Machine Learning Approaches to Automated Flow Cytometry Diagnosis of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

Flow cytometry is a technique that measures multiple fluorescence and light scatter-associated parameters from individual cells as they flow a single file through an excitation light source. These cells are labeled with antibodies to detect various antigens and the fluorescence signals reflect antigen expression. Interpretation of the multiparameter flow cytometry data is laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. It involves manual interpretation of cell distribution and pattern recognition on two-dimensional plots by highly trained medical technologists and pathologists. Using various machine learning algorithms, we attempted to develop an automated analysis for clinical flow cytometry cases that would automatically classify normal and chronic lymphocytic leukemia cases. We achieved the best success with the Gradient Boosting. The XGBoost classifier achieved a specificity of 1.00 and a sensitivity of 0.67, a negative predictive value of 0.75, a positive predictive value of 1.00, and an overall accuracy of 0.83 in prospectively classifying cases with malignancies.