The flowViz package provides tools for visualization of flow cytometry data. This document describes the support for visualizing gates (a.k.a. filters).
Tools to read in and otherwise manipulate flow cytometry data are implemented in the flowCore package. The flowViz package provides visualization support for such data. In this document we give examples dealing with gated or filtered data. Please consult the online documentation for more details on the high-level visualization functions used here.
The flowCore package defines the concepts of
filters and filterResults. Filters are abstract
entities defined in terms of markers that are measured on the flow
instrument as different channels, whereas a filter result is the
result of applying a filter to one or more flowFrames (data
objects representing individual FCM experiments). Some filters are
data driven, while some are not. We will later see how this
distinction has an impact on their plotting. All abstractions of
filters or gates inherit from class filter, whereas objects
generated as the result of applying a filter inherit from class
filterResult.
Before we discuss how to visualize gates in flowViz, we need
to point out that this may only be reasonable for certain types of the
many possible plots, namely one-dimensional density plots and
two-dimensional scatter plots. Over time we might add gate-plotting
support for other plot types as well. There are two principal ways to
add gates to a flow cytometry plot; either we render the outlines of
the gate region (for both one and two-dimensional plots), or we
highlight the points within a gate region by distinctive color,
glyphs, or point size (this applies for two-dimensional plots
only). It only makes sense to visualize the boundaries of a filter if
it has a (one or two dimensional) geometric representation. This is
true for rectangle, ellipsoid and polygon gates, which are all
frequently used. It is also true for some data driven gates,
e.g. norm2Filter gates, which have a (data dependent)
spherical representation. Also, it makes sense to draw gate
boundaries only when plotting (some of) the channels that define the
gate.
Visualizing filterResults is more general. Specifically, the
result of applying a filter is usually a logical (TRUE or
FALSE) vector for each cell, or more generally, a
factor (as long as we restrict ourselves to non-fuzzy
filters). This can be used as a grouping variable within a display,
also when plotting channels other than those defining the gate.
All data-driven filters depend on the filterResult to be
computed in order to plot them. The user doesn’t have to worry about
this fact, as the software will implicitly compute these objects if
necessary. However, realizing filters and creating
filterResult is often computationally intense and
time-consuming, and in many cases makes sense to explicitly create
the filterResult once and pass it on to the plotting
functions instead of the input filter. In the course of this manual,
filter objects and filterResults may be used
interchangeably, unless stated otherwise.
We use the GvHD data set to provide some examples. It come as
a serialized flowSet with the flowViz package and
the interested user is referred to its documentation for details. For
the purpose of this demonstration it is sufficient to know that the
phenoData slot of the GvHD set contains several
factor variables, Patient and Visit two of the
most descriptive ones. In general, all flowSets contain an
implicit name variable which is is used as the default
conditioning variable in all of flowViz’s high-level
plotting functions.
library(flowViz)
data(GvHD)
head(pData(GvHD))
## Patient Visit Days Grade name
## s5a01 5 1 -6 3 s5a01
## s5a02 5 2 0 3 s5a02
## s5a03 5 3 6 3 s5a03
## s5a04 5 4 12 3 s5a04
## s5a05 5 5 19 3 s5a05
## s5a06 5 6 26 3 s5a06
The set is quite large and reducing it to a reasonable subset will speed up things for our interactive demonstration purpose. Due to various constrains (data size, complexity of computations, limitations in the grid software underlying the lattice and flowViz packages), rendering plots is usually not instantaneous. It usually takes a little bit of time to output complex panel layouts. When producing postscript output, the user should be aware that file size may become an issue, and we will address solutions for this problem at the end of this document.
The lattice package offers inline subsetting capabilities
for all high level plotting functions though the subset
argument, and this functionality (like most of the other typical
lattice concepts) is also available for all derived
plotting methods in flowCore. The general idea here is that
all symbols defined in either the formula or one of the special
arguments like subset are evaluated in the context of the
flowFrame's phenoData data frame or the raw data
matrix. This is a slight extension of the fundamental
lattice idea necessitated by the fact that raw data and
annotation data are stored separately in a flowSet.
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD,
subset=Patient=="6")
Inline subsetting is useful to change plots on the fly, or to play
around with various panel arrangements. However, we still pass the
whole GvHD object down to the plotting function, potentially
increasing memory usage and decreasing performance due to unnecessary
heavy copying operations. Since we only want to use the subset for
patient 6 in the following examples, it makes sense to directly subset
the flowSet.
GvHD <- GvHD[pData(GvHD)$Patient==6]
We also want to transform some of the fluorescence channels to an
adequate log-like scale. A good choice is the asinh
function which can deal with negative values.
tf <- transformList(from=colnames(GvHD)[3:7], tfun=asinh)
GvHD <- tf %on% GvHD
For details on this step, please see the documentation of the
transformList and \%on\% functions in the
flowCore package.
Trellis scatter plots are created using xyplot methods.
The xyplot method for flowSet objects supports
filters through the filter argument. As mentioned before, its
value can either be an object inheriting from class filter or
a filterResult (a filterResultList of multiple
filterResults for flowSets).
The key concepts here are that
filters and filterResults can be used
interchangeably. Providing filterResults directly may
increase performance for data-driven filters.
visualization of filters depends on the type of
rendering. For example, with smooth=TRUE, filters are
visualized geometrically, which makes sense only under certain
circumstances (e.g. display axes matching filter parameters, the
filter class has a geometric represention). For scatter
plots of individual dots for all events (smooth=FALSE),
filters are visualized through grouping and/or geometric filter
outlines; the former makes sense more generally, as display
variables need not match filter parameters. Grouping has the
drawback of overplotting. The effect of overplotting can be reduced
somewhat using transparency, but scalability issues remain. We may
try dealing with this at some point if it becomes enough of a
hassle.
the software will check for matching parameters and available visualization representations as much as possible, yet finally it is up to the user to construct reasonable calls to the plotting functions.
Visualization of most of the typical FCM filter types is straight
forward and doesn’t require the computation of
filterResult. All parameters (e.g. min and max values in a
recangular gate) are unambigously defined in the filter
object. We will start with a simple rectangleGate in the
FSC-H and SSC-H dimensions.
As default for smoothed scatter plots, the gate boundaries are
drawn. Orientation of the gate will be handled by the plotting
function and the user doesn’t have to worry about the order of
arguments when defining the filter. The software also decides
on a reasonable two-dimensional geometric representation of more
complex filters. E.g., we can add a third dimension to the
rectangleGate and still achive the same visualization in the
FSC-H and SSC-H dimensions.
rgate2 <- rgate * rectangleGate("FL1-H"=c(2, 4))
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate2)
Most of the customization options defined in the lattice package will also work here. A more detailed discussion about the filter-specific graphical settings will follow in one of the later sections.
For the non-smoothed rendering (i.e., all events are plotted as individual points).
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate, smooth=FALSE)
Sometime non-smoothed plots can be slow for large number of events. We provide hexbin version of xyplot for faster rendering.
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate, smooth=FALSE,xbin=128)
Additionally, We can add statistics of gated population along with the filter to the plot
using the stat argument.pos and abs(whether the position is absolute or relative to filter boundary ) are used to control the label position.
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate,
smooth=FALSE, stat=TRUE,pos=0.5,abs=TRUE)
Sometime it is necessary to display multipe filters/gates in one panel to represent multiple sub-populations gated from the same parent populatuion.
recGate1<-rectangleGate("FL4-H"=c(3.3,5.3),"FL2-H"=c(2.5,5))
recGate2<-rectangleGate("FL4-H"=c(4,6),"FL2-H"=c(6,8))
filters1<-filters(list(recGate1,recGate2))
xyplot(`FL2-H` ~ `FL4-H`
,data=GvHD[[1]]
,filter=filters1
,stat=TRUE
,margin=FALSE
)
The constraint for a valid two-dimensional representation doesn’t
apply any more for this type of rendering. Since each event is
represented by a single point on the plot, we can visualize
arbitrarily complex filters using different colors or point
glyphs for the different sub-populations. However this implies that
we need to evaluate each filter, i.e., we need to figure out which of
the events are in and which are outside of the filter. We will see in
a minute how we can optimize these operations. Going back to our
three-dimensional rectangle, we notice that not all points within the
rectangle are also color red, because the additional third dimension
further reduced the selection of positive events in the
FSC-H and SSC-H dimensions.
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate2,
smooth=FALSE, outline=TRUE)
Overplotting is a potential problem for this representation. As a matter of fact, it is problematic for all visualization approaches of high-volume FCM data that try to display individual events rather than some form of summary statistic like density estimates. Partial transparency can alliviate some of these shortcomings but this approach does not scale well and has certain technical limitations on graphic devices that don’t support transparency. We will see in one of the following sections how to enable partial transparency in scatter plots.
Data-driven filters don’t have a natural geometric representation a
priori; they are data-driven. Once all parameters are estimated, we
can usually derive such a representation from the
filterResult. There is only a small subet of filter
classes for which this is not directly possible
(kmeansFilter, timeFilter), although one might be
able to fall back to approximations like convex hulls or similar. So
far, flowViz has nor support for plotting gate outlines of
these filter types, and they are silently ignored when passed on as
argument filter to any of the high-level plotting
functions. As shown in the previous example, the absence of a
two-dimensional spherical representation only poses a problem when
trying to plot filter boundaries, the non-smooth representation of
individual events is available for virtually all filter
types.
In the following example, we first compute the filterResults
of a norm2Filter in FSC-H and SSC-H for
each frame in our GvHD flowSet and plot their
geometric elliptic representation.
n2Filter <- norm2Filter("SSC-H", "FSC-H", scale=2, filterId="Lymphocytes")
n2Filter.results <- filter(GvHD, n2Filter)
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=n2Filter.results)
%
There are data-driven filter types that may result in more than just
one sub-population. curv1Filters and curv2Filters
are a prominent example. In the next code chunk we use a
curv2Filter to identify high-density areas in the
FSC-H and FL4-H projections of the data.
library(flowStats)
c2f <- curv2Filter("FSC-H", "FL4-H", bwFac=1.8)
c2f.results <- filter(GvHD, c2f)
xyplot(`FL4-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=c2f.results)
%
This is a good example for a case where passing the
filterResult instead of the filter helps to optimize
computation time. Depending on the hardware it can take quite a while
to complete the extensive computations necessary for the
identification of siginficant high-density areas in two
dimensions. Imagine you want to make slight changes to your plot (and
producing good graphical output is almost always an iterative
approach); having to recompute the filterResult on each
iteration would be very time-cosuming and annoying at best.
The lattice package provides the high-level
densityplot function to draw one-dimensional Kernel
density estimates of univariate data. Density estimates are a
generalization of the well-known histograms; instead of drawing boxes
of relative or absolute frequencies of binned observations, a
continous relative density is displayed, usually beautified by
applying a smoother function with an appropriate bandwidth. The
densityplot methods in the flowViz package
assume an implicit conditioning variable (the measurement channel or
channels) and display the density estimates of all frames for one
channel as a stacked layout. This has proven to be a useful
visualization, since the direct comparison of univariate channel
distributions is of great interest in many FCM application, however the
typically large number of samples makes superimposing in a single
display impratical. See the documention of densityplot for
more details.
In one-dimensional density plots it only makes sense to plot filter
boundaries. The densities are basically a summary of the distribution
of events for a particular channel, and there is no real notion of
individual events any more. Similar to the xyplot methods,
we can pass filters or filterResults to the function
as optional argument filter. We decided to indicate gate
boundaries by different shading of the the respective integrals of the
density regions rather than simply adding vertical lines. These tend
to be distracting in the stacked layout or are often partly masked by
overplotting of neighbouring density areas.
densityplot(~ `FSC-H`, GvHD, filter=curv1Filter("FSC-H"))
The situation gets slightly more complex when we are conditioning on
multiple FCM channels. In this case, filter has to be a list of equal
length as the number of channels that are supposed to be displayed
(i.e., the number of panels). Each list item may contain one of the
familiar objects of class filter, filterResult,
filterResultList, or NULL in case no filter should
be plotted at all for a given panel.
densityplot(~ ., GvHD, channels=c("FSC-H", "SSC-H", "FL1-H"),
filter=list(curv1Filter("FSC-H"), NULL, rgate2))
%
Note that by default the scale of the x axis has been adjusted for
each panel. This is contrary to the default settings in the
lattice package and can be reversed using appropriate
settings in in the scales argument.
Lattice graphics are a great tool to easily create informative and consise data visualization with a minimal amount of code. Most of its default graphical parameters are well thought through. However, there is also a wealth of customization available, and we refer readers to the package’s documentation as well as Deepayan Sarkar’s excellent book “Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R” for details. With respect to flowViz, it should suffice to mention that customization follows the exact same principles defined in the lattice package. As a matter of fact, most customization actually happens at the level of the underlying lattice software. The facts to mention are:
There are session-wide global defaults that can be queried and
set using the flowViz.par.get and
flowViz.par.set functions. These are extensions to the
trellis.par.get and trellis.par.set
functions in the lattice package, and work in exactly the
same way. All graphical parameters that are not defined in
flowViz are directly passed on to lattice.
Parameters can also be set for a single function call using the
par.settings argument. These setting take precedence over
global settings.
Parameters are split up into logical categories and have to be
provided as named lists or lists of lists. The categories directly
relevant for filter plotting are gate,
gate.density, and gate.text, the basic
flowViz settings are controlled by the
flow.symbol category. See the documentation for
flowViz.par.set for a complete list of available
parameters. All additional graphical parameters (like cex,
pch and col) known from the lattice
high-level plotting functions are also still available.
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate,
par.settings=list(gate=list(fill="black", alpha=0.2)))
%
We could have achieved the same customization by changing the session defaults:
flowViz.par.set(gate=list(fill="black", alpha=0.2))
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate)
Depending on the rendering, the graphical parameters may have slightly
different effects. The col parameters for instance sets the
line color for filter boundaries and the point color for non-smooth
scatter plots (and also the outline if outline=TRUE). In the
following code sample we try to make use of partial transparency to
address the problem of overplotting. Dense regions of the plot with
many overplotted points will apprear darker. Although this is better
than using opaque colors, lots of the underlying structure could still
be hidden and we strongly emphasize the advantages of smoothed scatter
plots for vizualization of FCM data.
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=rgate,
smooth=FALSE,
par.settings=list(gate=list(col="orange", alpha=0.04,
pch=20, cex=0.7),
flow.symbol=list(alpha=0.04, pch=20, cex=0.7)))
For multiple population filters, R ordinary recycling rules apply, and
we can spice up out plot of the curv2Filter results by using
a different color for each sub-population.
xyplot(`FL4-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=c2f.results,
par.settings=list(gate=list(fill=rainbow(10), alpha=0.5, col="transparent")))
Sometimes it helps to add population names to a
plot. flowCore provides default names for each
filter and their associated results, but the user is free to
pass their own custom names. The interface is very simple: argument
names either takes a logical scalar (default names are used
if TRUE) or a character vector. Again, recycing rules apply
when there are multiple sub-populations (unless default names are uses
in which case the software provides a reasonable choice).
xyplot(`SSC-H` ~ `FSC-H` | Visit, data=GvHD, filter=n2Filter.results,
names=TRUE,
par.settings=list(gate=list(fill="black", alpha=0.2,
col="transparent"),
gate.text=list(col="darkred", alpha=0.7, cex=0.6)))
We mentioned before that all elements of the formulae used in
flowViz are evaluated in the context of either the raw data
matrix or the phenoData slot. This implies that formula
components can themselves be valid R expressions including function
calls. To a certain extend this is true, and the user might be able to
produce reasonable graphical output by evaluating expressions on
existing data or annotation objects, however we strongly discourage
this use. The software makes certain assumptions on the relationship
between gate definitions and data, the most prominent one being that
both are on the same scale. The use of expressions in
flowViz potentially changes the scale of the raw data, in
which case the gate representation doesn’t make much sense
anymore. Furthermore, FCM data is naturally censored (by the available
measurement range of the instrument) and we try to protect the user
from irritating visual artifacts caused by the piling up of events on
the margins of the data range. This is most notable in the
one-dimensional densityplots, where densities are only computed within
the data range, and margin events are added as vertical
bars. Similarily, in the two-dimensional smoothed scatter plots, we
display margin events as ticks around the actual data display. Again,
changing the scale of the data would potentially invalidate many of
the necessary computations.
In summary, lattice encourages the use of expressions in the formula interface and for the sake of customizability we didn’t want to exclude this feature completely in the flowViz methods. However, the tool has to be used with great care, particularly when plotting gates.
Although the filter argument does not make much sense except
in scatter plots, filterResults can be used for grouping in
other contexts. So far, only the parallel method supports
this syntax.
parallel(~ . | Visit, GvHD, filter=n2Filter.results, alpha = 0.01)
