Mathematica as a Tool for Interactive Display of Flow Cytometry and Clinical Data

Abstract In a prior study, we used flow cytometry to characterize lymphocytes from mother-infant pairs from healthy and preeclamptic pregnancies. Despite a relatively low number of study participants, we acquired a large, multidimensional dataset and felt limited in our capacity to fully explore it. Here we describe the use of Mathematica to create an interactive display tool that allows dynamic data exploration. The end result is a HIPAA compliant data library and code that can be exported, published, and explored by readers with the freely available MathReader application. Our database included flow cytometry data from 8 staining panels with up to 15 markers each, clinical, and obstetric data in MS Excel. By combining Mathematica’s Chart, Manipulate, and Tooltip functions, we incorporated the clinical variables including neonatal sex, birth weight, and prior obstetric history into each graph, while the Tooltip function displays the participant study ID. We have coded an interactive tool that allows the rapid display of data from multiple complex datasets in a single, interactive graph allowing the scientist to compare immunologic parameters between specific clinical conditions. This makes it possible to highlight, for example: activated NK-, NKT-, γδT -, naïve CD4 T, CD8 T-, memory CD4 T, and memory CD8 T cells from mothers with PE who gave birth to female neonates who were small for gestational age, and easily change all those graphs to highlight those patients who gave birth normal size fetuses. Interactive tools are ideal to display complex, multidimensional data such as human immune phenotyping. Ideally, they should also be publishable as interactive tools for the reader to explore on their own. Mathematica allows for this.