Implementing flowDensity for Automated Analysis of Bone Marrow Lymphocyte Population

INTRODUCTION: Manual gating of flow cytometry (FCM) data for marrow cell analysis is a standard approach in current practice, although it is time- and labor-consuming. Recent advances in cytometry technology have led to significant efforts in developing partially or fully automated analysis methods. Although multiple supervised and unsupervised FCM data analysis algorithms have been developed, they have not been widely adopted by the clinical and research laboratories. In this study, we evaluated flowDensity, an open source freely available algorithm, as an automated analysis tool for classification of lymphocyte subsets in the bone marrow biopsy specimens. MATERIALS AND METHODS: FlowDensity-based gating was applied to 102 normal bone marrow samples and compared with the manual analysis. Independent expression of each cell marker was assessed for comprehensive expression analysis and visualization. RESULTS: Our findings showed a correlation between the manual and flowDensity-based gating in the lymphocyte subsets. However, flowDensity-based gating in the populations with a small number of cells in each cluster showed a low degree of correlation. Comprehensive expression analysis successfully identified and visualized the lymphocyte subsets. DISCUSSION: Our study found that although flowDensity might be a promising method for FCM data analysis, more optimization is required before implementing this algorithm into day-to-day workflow.