Rare-event analysis (REA) is the art of finding a needle in a haystack,confirming that it is a needle,and making measurements to determine what kind of needle it is.A rare event is typically one occurring at a frequency of below 1 in 1,000 (0.1%) [1,2].Numerous measurements are needed to detect rare events,such as tumour cells in peripheral blood,and it was historically a long-winded process as conventional-speed flow analysers had a maximum acquisition speed of 1,000-3,000 events per second.Modern flow cytometers can detect up to 10,000 events per second [3],leading to flow cytometry-based assays increasingly being used for oncological REA.Results from up to 10 million cells [3] can now be collected but,often,the bottleneck shifted to data analysis since most current flow cytometry software has problems analysing large data flies.
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