Machine Learning for Flow Cytometry Data Analysis
This work addresses the challenge of interpreting high-dimensional flow cytometry data for biomedical researchers, but it is incremental as it compares existing methods without introducing major innovations.
The thesis evaluated automated clustering algorithms for flow cytometry data analysis, focusing on identifying cell populations, and found that the ProClus algorithm performed poorly but was useful for noise detection.
Flow cytometry mainly used for detecting the characteristics of a number of biochemical substances based on the expression of specific markers in cells. It is particularly useful for detecting membrane surface receptors, antigens, ions, or during DNA/RNA expression. Not only can it be employed as a biomedical research tool for recognising distinctive types of cells in mixed populations, but it can also be used as a diagnostic tool for classifying abnormal cell populations connected with disease. Modern flow cytometers can rapidly analyse tens of thousands of cells at the same time while also measuring multiple parameters from a single cell. However, the rapid development of flow cytometers makes it challenging for conventional analysis methods to interpret flow cytometry data. Researchers need to be able to distinguish interesting-looking cell populations manually in multi-dimensional data collected from millions of cells. Thus, it is essential to find a robust approach for analysing flow cytometry data automatically, specifically in identifying cell populations automatically. This thesis mainly concerns discover the potential shortcoming of current automated-gating algorithms in both real datasets and synthetic datasets. Three representative automated clustering algorithms are selected to be applied, compared and evaluated by completely and partially automated gating. A subspace clustering ProClus also implemented in this thesis. The performance of ProClus in flow cytometry is not well, but it is still a useful algorithm to detect noise.