A computational framework to emulate the human perspective in flow cytometric data analysis

Background: In recent years, intense research efforts have focused on developing methods for automated flow cytometric data analysis. However, while designing such applications, little or no attention has been paid to the human perspective that is absolutely central to the manual gating process of identifying and characterizing cell populations. In particular, the assumption of many common techniques that cell populations could be modeled reliably with pre-specified distributions may not hold true in real-life samples, which can have populations of arbitrary shapes and considerable inter-sample variation. <p/>Results: To address this, we developed a new framework flowScape for emulating certain key aspects of the human perspective in analyzing flow data, which we implemented in multiple steps. First, flowScape begins with creating a mathematically rigorous map of the high-dimensional flow data landscape based on dense and sparse regions defined by relative concentrations of events around modes. In the second step, these modal clusters are connected with a global hierarchical structure. This representation allows flowScape to perform ridgeline analysis for both traversing the landscape and isolating cell populations at different levels of resolution. Finally, we extended manual gating with a new capacity for constructing templates that can identify target populations in terms of their relative parameters, as opposed to the more commonly used absolute or physical parameters. This allows flowScape to apply such templates in batch mode for detecting the corresponding populations in a flexible, sample-specific manner. We also demonstrated different applications of our framework to flow data analysis and show its superiority over other analytical methods. <p/>Conclusions: The human perspective, built on top of intuition and experience, is a very important component of flow cytometric data analysis. By emulating some of its approaches and extending these with automation and rigor, flowScape provides a flexible and robust framework for computational cytomics

Doing and undoing gender in male carer/female breadwinner families

This study aimed to explore the allocation of family work among male carer/female breadwinner couples in comparison to traditional couples, in an attempt to identify the most change-resistant aspects of gendered family roles. A sample of 236 parents with children from birth to 5 years old completed extensive questionnaires about their daily routines and allocation of tasks. As hypothesised, primary caregiving fathers and mothers performed a similar share of housework and physical childcare tasks and were more involved in these forms of family work than breadwinning fathers and mothers. Also as hypothesised, primary caregiving mothers assumed a greater share of the emotional care and overall responsibility for childcare than primary caregiving fathers. That is, whereas primary caregiving mothers carried out most of the emotional care and responsibility for childcare with very little involvement of the breadwinning fathers, among role-reversed couples emotional care and responsibility were shared more equally. These findings suggest that overall, role-reversed couples ‘undo’ gender by performing tasks according to their family role rather than prescriptive gender norms. The results further support the distinction between the more malleable forms of family work and the most change-resistant aspects of gendered parenting