De Novo Software

Best Layout Contest Winners

We would like to thank everyone who submitted entries to our Best Published Layout Contest. We got many exciting entries highlighting original and creative data analysis layouts using many of the features offered by FCS Express such as tokens, histogram subtraction, and of course Publishing.

Here are our 2008 winners!

Grand Prize

The grand prize is a travel award to the XXIV ISAC Congress in Budapest, Hungary. This award can be used to cover travel costs such airfare, hotel accommodation and meeting registration fees.

Our Grand Prize winner was submitted by Uriel Trahtemberg, M.Sc. Uriel is an MD/PhD student at the Laboratory for Cellular and Molecular Immunology at the Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem.

Uriel's layout is an experiment to determine the kinetics of the expression of CCR7 (a chemokine receptor which causes Dendritic Cells to return to their lymph node home to interact with T cells) on DCs and it's relative expression according to viability status.

In this experiment, 10 ng/mL LPS was added to immature, human monocyte-derived dendritic cells (DCs) to induce their maturation. The marker CCR7 was followed for three days after addition of LPS. CCR7 was detected using a purified mouse anti-human CCR7 monoclonal antibody followed by a PE-conjugated goat anti-mouse monoclonal antibody. Viability was assesed using Sytox Blue (SB), a necrotic exclusion dye excited by a violet laser. Controls consisted of unstained cells and of cells stained only with the PE-conjugated goat anti-mouse monoclonal antibody.

Uriel comments on FCS Express and his analysis:

The visual customization features, like lines, text boxes, axis labels and properties, legends, titles, overlays, etc go a long way towards making the analysis readable, clear and elegant. The ability to use tokens inside tables permits to present the specific statistics you want in the context that you want. The histogram substraction method is essential in cases like this where the difference between positive and negative cells is incremental and does not allow to place a marker to clearly separate them. The ability to create custom tokens allows me to prepare a complete analysis in the layout, as well as dynamically changing values. The flexibility and control of the gating and overlays is very important to be able to obtain the data that I want.

Click here to take a look at Uriel's published layout.

First Prize

The first prize is 8GB iPod Touch.

Our first first prize winner is Rebecca Martin from Northwestern University. Rebecca 's entry entitled "Chronic" is an automated layout to aid in the diagnosis of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). This particular layout contains tokens that would alert the technician of a possible Cezary/ATL, CLL, Mantle cell, or Follicular lymphoma. The layout consists of one patient that is displayed from start to finish.

Initially a CD19+ CD5+ population that exceeds the criteria determined by the clinician was found, suggesting CLL or Mantle cell lymphoma. To confirm this, the layout then looks at the Kappa/Lambda ratio, FMC7, CD79b, and CD23 to separate a CLL from a Mantle cell. It was determined through these phenotypic markers that this patient had CLL. Then as a further follow-up, the prognostic markers CD38 and Zap 70 were analyzed and reported. Fluorescent thresholds are based on internal populations that are known to be negative for a given parameter. For example, CD23 is not expressed in T cells; therefore markers used to determine CD23 in B cells, is determined via a relative comparison to T cells. Other less clear populations were determined by previously defined values based on clinicians’ input.

Click here to interact with Rebecca's Published layout.

Second Prize

Second prize is a 4GB iPod Nano.

Our Second Prize winner was submitted by Tom Sawyer from the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio. Tom submitted a Clinical layout used to rule out non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma using a 10 tube, 3 color (FITC, PE, APC) lymphoma panel.

Tom took full advantage of using FCS Express tokens to create a custom and automated report page shown above.

He describes how tokens and other features in FCS Express helps his lab to improve their analysis and reports :

Tokens have been created to display the desired results in the body of the report. The data in the report updates automatically whenever the quadstat cursors are changed. The ability to insert a table into the text box and place tokens in the table made this process quite simple to accomplish. The fact that tokens can be based on individual quadrants or pairs of quadrants allowed us to capture the exact data desired. Selected demographic information at the top of the report has also been captured from the original listmode file(s) using tokens. The interpretation in this layout is for cases in which lymphoma is not detected. Both the CD4:CD8 ratio and Kappa:Lambda ratio are calculated automatically using custom tokens. The light chain analysis page (pg 5) is included since most lymphoma cases in our lab are of B-cell origin. The kappa:lambda ratio on this page is also a custom token. The entire layout is saved with the listmode files embedded for each patient. This is very handy for satisfying the new CAP requirement for 10 year record retention for immunophentyping cases. We are currently building a library of interpretations which can be copied and pasted into the interpretation text box of the report page. We are also building templates for more complex cases in which multiple gating strategies and varying antibody panels are required.

Click here to take a better look at Tom's layout.

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