Automated Cytometric Gating with Human-Level Performance Using Bivariate Segmentation

Abstract

Recent advances in cytometry technology have enabled high-throughput data collection with multiple single-cell protein expression measurements. The significant biological and technical variance between samples in cytometry has long posed a formidable challenge during the gating process, especially for the initial gates which deal with unpredictable events, such as debris and technical artifacts. Even with the same experimental machine and protocol, the target population, as well as the cell population that needs to be excluded, may vary across different measurements. To address this challenge and mitigate the labor-intensive manual gating process, we propose a deep learning framework UNITO to rigorously identify the hierarchical cytometric subpopulations. The UNITO framework transformed a cell-level classification task into an image-based semantic segmentation problem. For reproducibility purposes, the framework was applied to three independent cohorts and successfully detected initial gates that were required to identify single cellular events as well as subsequent cell gates. We validated the UNITO framework by comparing its results with previous automated methods and the consensus of at least four experienced immunologists. UNITO outperformed existing automated methods and differed from human consensus by no more than each individual human. Most critically, UNITO framework functions as a fully automated pipeline after training and does not require human hints or prior knowledge. Unlike existing multi-channel classification or clustering pipelines, UNITO can reproduce a similar contour compared to manual gating for each intermediate gating to achieve better interpretability and provide post hoc visual inspection. Beyond acting as a pioneering framework that uses image segmentation to do auto-gating, UNITO gives a fast and interpretable way to assign the cell subtype membership, and the speed of UNITO will not be impacted by the number of cells from each sample. The pre-gating and gating inference takes approximately 2 minutes for each sample using our pre-defined 9 gates system, and it can also adapt to any sequential prediction with different configurations.