Figure 2
Qualitative analysis of PBMC immunophenotyping data using (A) viSNE and (B) FlowSOM reveals differences in immune cell lineages between PBC and control. (A) Mass cytometry samples from 33 PBC patients were concatenated into 100,000 randomly-sampled total events and mapped onto a t-SNE plot using viSNE (left). Analogously, samples from 33 age-/sex-matched controls were mapped using viSNE (right). Each point in the t-SNE plot represents a single event (e.g., cell) detected by the mass cytometer, and colors vary according to cell abundance density. Observed regional differences in cell densities correspond to differences in relative abundances of major immune cell lineages. (B) FlowSOM clusters cells into cell subsets based on their marker expression patterns, and generates a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) of those clusters (left: PBC; right: control). Each node is characterized by a pie chart, whose diameter is proportional to the number of events, and whose colors indicate specific markers defined in the legend. The background colors group nodes into cell types that correspond to different major immune cell types (FlowSOM Metaclusters). Each link connects cell subsets of similar marker expression patterns. In the two MSTs of PBC and control, the nodes located in the same position correspond to the same cell subset.
