4. Now, on to analysis in CytoMAP.
I recommend going through the documentation here, look at the options on the right side of the screen. While I intended this to be a few quick steps, it got a bit out of control.
If you classified your cells in QuPath, you can use the “Annotate Clusters” button to tell CytoMAP that it should treat that “Class” entry in your CSV as a list of clusters. One of the great recent changes is that even if you have 30+ classes, it will autofill them all for you!
I will jump straight into the two options I use most “Cluster Cells” and “Dimensionality Reduction.”
Cluster Cells
When you first select Cluster Cells, you will get an interface like this.
Image+description:Cluster cells interface
Select All/All in Use for Sorting in the upper left. If you do not, CytoMAP will try to cluster zero cells. It does not work well.
Next select the measurements you want to cluster based on, and adjust any Weights (half hidden column “Wei…”) for measurements you think are more important. Be careful with this. Great power, great responsibility, all that. I would not include any positional data like the XYZ coordinates, or any strings in this case (maybe string data should not show up here?).
At the bottom, starting from the left, I usually select “Standardize” rather than Raw MFI (mean fluorescent intensity), as I do not want to weight the results based on my brightest channels.
Normalize as is appropriate for your project, if you are not sure, the forum should be a good place to ask! I have never altered Color scheme.
Number of Regions is very important, and you can either use one of the built in auto-detection algorithms, or select your own. I generally start with the built in options, and then increase the number of base clusters to study what happens, and where the algorithm finds differences in the data. There is no single right answer; there are many right and wrong answers, however. Depending on how you normalized, you may find that clusters form “per sample” due to variations in staining, for example. You may want to merge those clusters for downstream analysis (overclustering).
Input Data Type: For the moment, use individual cells. Explore the other options once you are comfortable generating neighborhood data.
Select Algorithm: I have not explored the variations in these quite enough to really say when one in particular should be used. Try them all!
Huge note that I missed earlier, there is a menu at the top where you can File->Save or Load model.
Example first run.
Image+description:Cluster cells first run
I usually name the model (the results) after the settings I used. The model above, for example, was called “Standardize DB NN 1”. If you do not include information about the settings you use, I do not believe they are stored anywhere else, so it can be hard to replicate an analysis on another or larger data set.
Once you run it, this may take some time, so check your CPU utilization if you are worried that the program has stopped.
In Windows:

If you chose to allow an automatic detection of the number of clusters, you should get both some sort of plot and a Figure on completion of the analysis.
There is way too much to go over here, so I recommend the official documentation, but I want to point out that the Y axis is inverted as QuPath starts Y values from 0 at the top of the image.
Image: Cluster analysis results

In the Options in the lower left of the Figure, you can Invert the Y axis. The “C-Axis” options are your color map (which can also be changed in the Options).
The cluster analysis we just ran results in:
Image: Cluster analysis results colormap

Ok. So. That is a thing. I feel like an optometrist is about to ask me which number is hidden in the picture. But, we can at least see that some of the clusters align with structures from the original image. What does it mean though? Well, thankfully, there are heatmaps! Go back to the original CytoMAP window and select Extensions->cell_heatmaps.m
Since this is going a bit long, I will simply show the options I selected, and feel free to ask if you have any questions!
Image: Heatmap options
And the result is in!
Right off, I can identify two clusters that are heavy in CK which represent the majority of the tumor area (6 and 9 and green and red in the previous XY map). The primary difference between the two seems to be the size of the nucleus. Is that useful? I am not sure, ask the biologists! However, we could include other measurements from QuPath at this point, like nearest CD8+ cell, or similar distance based measurements, which might tease out more differences between the clusters. You can include data on the heatmap that was not used in the generation of the clusters!
A couple of other things that jumped out: The CD8 and FOXP3 clusters are relatively rare compared to most other clusters and PDL1 seems mostly associated with the CD68 positive cells, both of which might tell us something about the tumor microenvironment in this case.
Dimensionality Reduction, tSNE plots and manual gating!
I chose similar settings for the quick Dimensionality Reduction example as for the cluster analysis. There are also other options like PHATE, but I only included tSNE here for, hah, “brevity.”
Note that I did exclude the cluster analysis results, as I did not want them to bias the tSNE plot.
Settings choices for tSNE:
Image: tSNE options
From the MATLAB implementation: https://www.mathworks.com/help/stats/tsne.html#bvh3rti-2
Fun reading about tSNE variables (thanks @cstoltzfus !): https://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/
I chose the default settings and, after a short wait, obtained the following plot.

A tSNE plot of QuPath data! Dreams do come true!
The one change I did make was changing the color axis to the previously discovered clusters, so I could see how they matched up. I can see clusters 9 and 6 on the left, which would be the tumor region, and a fairly well separated cluster 5 on the right. Cluster 5 was my FOXP3 cells, but why are there cluster 2, 3 and 4 cells mixed in? I wonder where and what those are?
That is where Gating comes in. There are two ways I could go about this, either selecting the entire cluster on the right, or trying to grab only the non-cluster 5 cells in that tSNE cluster. I will simply create a gate or two and bring that data back into QuPath.
First, click Show Table and change All/All to All Cells, as shown. Then Exit Table and use the annotation options to draw some gates.

The useful buttons, from left to right:

Clear plot.
Refresh image: This is useful if you run a new cluster analysis in another window, and want to view those results in your tSNE plot.
Square gate: Draw a square gate.
Polygon gate: Draw a polygon gate, close it by clicking on the first point a second time.
Save Last Chosen Gate: This is very important. It does not save ALL gates, it only saves the last gate selected. But if you never save the gates, you cannot do anything with the gates, like import them back into QuPath.
When you click on a button to create a gate, it will first ask you to name it.
This is my gate. There are many like it, but this one is mine

The cursor changes to a crosshairs, and you can start clicking to draw your gate.
Edges can be tricky and I recommend setting your first point far away from an edge. After completing your gate, you can always drag it around to capture points near the edge of the image. Dragging the gate will “push” the edge.
Final gates; I also created a CK gate.

A quick check of the heatmaps for those gates.
How do I create a heatmap for gates?
By selecting the gates I want to analyze and the Phenotypes option within “Select What To Compare” I can see that some of the tSNE FOXP3 cluster now includes CD68 and PD1 positive cells.
There currently seems to be a bug when choosing Select Heatmap Type, if you attempt to choose Combined heatmap for all samples. Individual will work.
Remembering that this is not flow data, what we may be seeing here is interactions between macrophages and FOXP3 positive cells.