Applied & Computational Mathematics seminar: Uncertainty quantification in flow cytometry using a cell sorter

Speaker: Amudhan Krishnaswamy Usha (NIST)

Title:  Uncertainty quantification in flow cytometry using a cell sorter

Abstract:  Flow cytometers are used to measure the florescence intensity emitted by cells or particles tagged with fluorophores. They are widely used in biomedical research and clinical diagnostics.  A fluorescence-activated cell sorter is used in conjunction with a cytometer to isolate subpopulations of interest, such as cells whose measured fluorescence intensity is below a given threshold.  If one were to re-measure such a subset, the resulting distribution of intensities should ideally contain no values above the chosen threshold. In reality, the presence of instrument-induced noise causes some 'spillover'. Under the assumption of homoscedastic additive Gaussian noise, I will show how this 'post-sort' distribution can be used to construct an estimator for the noise variance. This lets us distinguish population and instrument variability, which lets us objectively compare the performance of different flow cytometers.

Time:  Friday, September 27 – 1:30pm – 2:30pm
Place:  Exploratory Hall, room 4106 and  Zoom