SOULCAP: The Reference Map Cytometry Never Had. The where defines the what

THE SPEAKER

Ryan Brinkman, PhD - Vice President and Research Director, Flow Cytometry (Dotmatics). Founding Director, SOULCAP Foundation, Professor (Emeritus), Department of Medical Genetics, UBC

Ryan Brinkman is Founding Director of the SOULCAP Foundation and VP of R&D for Flow Cytometry at Dotmatics. He is ISAC President-Elect for 2026-2028 and will assume the Presidency in 2028. He has been an ISAC member since 2004 and was among the first cohort of the Marylou Ingram Scholars Program, from 2006 to 2010. He chaired the Data Standards Task Force from 2008 to 2020, served on Council from 2010 to 2016, and the Editorial Board of Cytometry Part A. He received the Society's Distinguished Service Award in 2018, and currently represents ISAC on the NIST Flow Cytometry Standards Consortium, where he has led FCS 4.0 metadata standardization. 

His work spans the data standards this community relies on, including FCS, Gating-ML and MIFlowCyt, open-source tools including flowCore and flowDensity, and community infrastructure including FlowRepository and the FlowCAP evaluations. He founded Cytapex Bioinformatics, later acquired by Dotmatics.

His current community work is through SOULCAP, which addresses the need for standardized cell population annotation terminology to enable AI-based analysis of flow cytometry data.

WEBINAR SUMMARY

Flow cytometry has no shared vocabulary for the immune cell populations it identifies. Marker combinations, gating strategies and population names vary from lab to lab and study to study, which limits reproducibility, blocks reuse of decades of existing data, and impedes AI-based analysis. SOULCAP is a nonprofit foundation that is setting the standards for naming and identifying immune cell populations in flow cytometry, and does the research to back them.

This webinar introduces the SOULCAP approach. Rather than mandating fixed panels, SOULCAP standardizes individual populations as modular building blocks: consensus marker combinations and names agreed through a structured Delphi process, links to the Cell Ontology so each label carries a formal meaning, and a geometric Reference Map that describes each population as a stable region in continuous phenotype space. SOULCAP does not claim cell populations are discrete; it standardizes the landmarks used to refer to them, so labs working on different instruments and panels arrive at comparable labels. Our initial focus is on healthy adult peripheral blood.

We will cover how cells are matched to the Reference Map with a calibrated confidence score, how results from both manual gating and clustering tools such as FlowSOM can be reported in the same standard terms, how automated labelers are tested for conformance, and how researchers, core facilities, vendors and pharma can contribute data, expert gating and consensus input.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After this webinar, participants will be able to:
1) Explain how inconsistent marker combinations, gating strategies and population names limit reproducibility, data reuse and AI-based analysis in flow cytometry.
2) Describe SOULCAP's population-level approach: consensus nomenclature through a Delphi process, Cell Ontology linkage, and a geometric Reference Map.
3) Explain how cells or clusters receive SOULCAP labels with a confidence score, and how automated labeling will work.
4) Identify ways their own lab, core facility or organization can contribute.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:
Computational Biologists/Bioinformaticians, Data Analysts, Educators/Trainers, Industry Scientists (vendor-agnostic; tool developers; method inventors), Research Scientists, Shared Resource Laboratory (SRL) Managers), Shared Resource Laboratory (SRL) Staff), Trainees (graduate students, postdocs, early-career researchers), Translational Immunologists

Keywords: Data Standards, nomenclature, reproducibility

CMLE Credit: 1.0