Computational prediction of manually gated rare cells in flow cytometry data

Rare cell identification is an interesting and challenging question in flow cytometry data analysis. In the literature, manual gating is a popular approach to distill flow cytometry data and drill down to the rare cells of interest, based on prior knowledge of measured protein markers and visual inspection of the data. Several computational algorithms have been proposed for rare cell identification. To compare existing algorithms and promote new developments, FlowCAP-III put forward one computational challenge that focused on this question. The challenge provided flow cytometry data for 202 training samples and two manually gated rare cell types for each training sample, roughly 0.02 and 0.04% of the cells, respectively. In addition, flow cytometry data for 203 testing samples were provided, and participants were invited to computationally identify the rare cells in the testing samples. Accuracy of the identification results was evaluated by comparing to manual gating of the testing samples. We participated in the challenge, and developed a method that combined the Hellinger divergence, a downsampling trick and the ensemble SVM. Our method achieved the highest accuracy in the challenge.