Learning cell identity in immunology, neuroscience, and cancer.

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Suspension and imaging cytometry techniques that simultaneously measure hundreds of cellular features are powering a new era of cell biology and transforming our understanding of human tissues and tumors. The expansion of automated, machine-driven methods for learning cell identity has further created an urgent need for a harmonized framework for distinguishing cell identity across fields and technology platforms.

🔑 Key Findings

• However, a central challenge remains in learning the identities of unexpected or novel cell types.
• Cell identification rubrics that could assist trainees, whether human or machine, are not always rigorously defined, vary greatly by field, and differentially rely on cell intrinsic measurements, cell extrinsic tissue measurements, or external contextual information such as clinical outcomes.
• This challenge is especially acute in the context of tumors, where cells aberrantly express developmental programs that are normally time, location, or cell-type restricted.

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