Cytometry enables precise single-cell phenotyping within heterogeneous populations. These cell types are traditionally annotated via manual gating, but this method suffers from a lack of reproducibility and sensitivity to batch-effect. Also, the most recent cytometers - spectral flow or mass cytometers - create rich and high-dimensional data whose analysis via manual gating becomes challenging and time-consuming. To tackle these limitations, we introduce Scyan (https://github.com/MICS-Lab/scyan), a Single-cell Cytometry Annotation Network that automatically annotates cell types using only prior expert knowledge about the cytometry panel. We demonstrate that Scyan significantly outperforms the related state-of-the-art models on multiple public datasets while being faster and interpretable. In addition, Scyan overcomes several complementary tasks such as batch-effect removal, debarcoding, and population discovery. Overall, this model accelerates and eases cell population characterisation, quantification, and discovery in cytometry.
@article{arxiv.2208.05745,
title = {A biology-driven deep generative model for cell-type annotation in cytometry},
author = {Quentin Blampey and Nadège Bercovici and Charles-Antoine Dutertre and Isabelle Pic and Fabrice André and Joana Mourato Ribeiro and Paul-Henry Cournède},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.05745},
year = {2023}
}