Flow cytometry (FCM) determines the characteristics of individual biological cells using optical and fluorescence measurements. It is a widely used standard method for analysing blood samples in medical diagnostics, through identifying and quantifying the different types of cells in the samples. The multidimensional dataset obtained from FCM is large and complex, so it is difficult and time-consuming to analyse manually. The main process of differentiation and therefore labelling of the different cell populations in the data is referred to as Gating. This is the first step of FCM and is highly subjective, an issue that significant research has focussed on reducing. Existing automated gating techniques are time-consuming or retain subjectivity by requiring many user-defined parameters. This paper presents FLOPTICS: a novel automated gating technique that is a combination of density-based and grid-based clustering algorithms. FLOPTICS has an ability to classify and label cell populations in FCM data faster and with fewer user-defined parameters than many state-of-the-art techniques.

Gating is a process of cell differentiation of the data obtaining from flow cytometry technique. Flow cytometry (FCM) is a fluorescence concept technique that provide characteristics of individual cells in blood sample. A multidimensional dataset obtained from this method is large and complex so it is difficult to manually analysis and time consuming. Gating is the first step of FCM data analysis and highly subjective. Although many research attempted to reduce this subjectivity, more standard and faster gating technique is still needed. Some existing automated gating technique need many user-defined parameters that can lead to different results for different parameter values. Some techniques have a trouble with time consuming. FLOPTICS is a novel automated gating technique that is a combination of density-based and grid-based clustering algorithms. FLOPTICS has an ability to classify cell on FCM data faster and less user-defined parameter than some of state of art technique such as FlowGrid, FlowPeaks, and FLOCK.

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