Hierarchical Modeling for Rare Event Detection and Cell Subset Alignment across Flow Cytometry Samples

Flow cytometry is the prototypical assay for multi-parameter single cell analysis, and is essential in vaccine and biomarker research for the enumeration of antigen-specific lymphocytes that are often found in extremely low frequencies (0.1% or less). Standard analysis of flow cytometry data relies on visual identification of cell subsets by experts, a process that is subjective and often difficult to reproduce. An alternative and more objective approach is the use of statistical models to identify cell subsets of interest in an automated fashion. Two specific challenges for automated analysis are to detect extremely low frequency event subsets without biasing the estimate by pre-processing enrichment, and the ability to align cell subsets across multiple data samples for comparative analysis. In this manuscript, we develop hierarchical modeling extensions to the Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM) approach we have previously described for cell subset identification, and show that the hierarchical DPGMM (HDPGMM) naturally generates an aligned data model that captures both commonalities and variations across multiple samples. HDPGMM also increases the sensitivity to extremely low frequency events by sharing information across multiple samples analyzed simultaneously. We validate the accuracy and reproducibility of HDPGMM estimates of antigen-specific T cells on clinically relevant reference peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) samples with known frequencies of antigen-specific T cells. These cell samples take advantage of retrovirally TCR-transduced T cells spiked into autologous PBMC samples to give a defined number of antigen-specific T cells detectable by HLA-peptide multimer binding. We provide open source software that can take advantage of both multiple processors and GPU-acceleration to perform the numerically-demanding computations. We show that hierarchical modeling is a useful probabilistic approach that can provide a consistent labeling of cell subsets and increase the sensitivity of rare event detection in the context of quantifying antigen-specific immune responses.Author Summary: The use of flow cytometry to count antigen-specific T cells is essential for vaccine development, monitoring of immune-based therapies and immune biomarker discovery. Analysis of such data is challenging because antigen-specific cells are often present in frequencies of less than 1 in 1,000 peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). Standard analysis of flow cytometry data relies on visual identification of cell subsets by experts, a process that is subjective and often difficult to reproduce. Consequently, there is intense interest in automated approaches for cell subset identification. One popular class of such automated approaches is the use of statistical mixture models. We propose a hierarchical extension of statistical mixture models that has two advantages over standard mixture models. First, it increases the ability to detect extremely rare event clusters that are present in multiple samples. Second, it enables direct comparison of cell subsets by aligning clusters across multiple samples in a natural way arising from the hierarchical formulation. We demonstrate the algorithm on clinically relevant reference PBMC samples with known frequencies of CD8 T cells engineered to express T cell receptors specific for the cancer-testis antigen (NY-ESO-1) and compare its performance with other popular automated analysis approaches.