Beckman Coulter Life Sciences Cytobank platform v10

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences has introduced an automated solution for the time-consuming gating of flow cytometry data, with no programming skills required. This feature is part of the Cytobank v10 platform upgrade.

The Cytobank platform is a cloud-based analysis solution for cytometry data and provides powerful visual data management and controlled data sharing. By providing access to machine learning-assisted analysis without the need for coding knowledge or programming skills, the platform helps researchers discover insights from high-dimensional data with the use of unbiased approaches that reduce reproducibility issues, eliminating operator-dependent bias. Users benefit from the platform’s ability to provide illustrations that relate to raw data, effortless data management and ease in sharing and collaborating with colleagues.

Inconsistencies among operators have been identified as a leading contributor to variability in flow cytometry data analysis. The Cytobank Automatic gating feature can address this issue and reduce variability compared to manual gating, which can take hours or even days to complete — especially for large and complex panels or datasets with many files. According to Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, Cytobank Automatic gating can take up to 75% less time to complete compared to manual gating of the full dataset for population identification, depending on the complexity of the gating strategy.

The automation feature allows lab staff to set up their own gating strategy on a set of files, train a model and then reproducibly analyse more samples using the trained model. The trained model can then easily be shared with colleagues around the globe. This two-step workflow saves users hands-on time, reduces variability and empowers collaboration across institutions. When new data needs to be analysed, users simply start a new automatic gating inference run with the trained model.