When the flow cytometrist measures more than one cellular parameter he/she automatically gives him/herself problems. One of these problems is just how to display the data in order to convey those special features of the flow measurement the determination of which was the goal of the experiment. Many monochrome graphical solutions have been proposed in the course of the flow cytometric era but, until recently, there have been only sporadic forays into the area of colour graphics. Now, colour graphic solutions like Paint-a-gate (B-D), Gateway/Rainbow (Coulter) and Iso-Contour (Verity) promise to change the way we look at multiparameter data.
As an alternative or as an adjunct to these commercial packages, many FCM laboratories may consider developing their own software solutions. Those presented here represent a set of simple colour graphic enhancements to techniques already familiar in monochrome. These programs have been written in Fortran for use on a pdp 11/73 with Data Translations graphics processor but the principles are transportable.
Firstly, the use of colour-coded histograms aids curve identification when gating and re-plotting list mode data. Secondly, the standard "dot plot" two-parameter display can be made a pseudo-three-parameter display by encoding a third parameter as dot colour. Thirdly, it has been shown possible to generate useful three-D effects in a more genuinely three- parameter dotplot by making use of colour-coded stereoscopic or parallax viewing. Unfortunately, in local testing, this latter technique occasionally has failed to excite the odd viewer, there being those who can and a minority who cannot see the third dimension.