Background Signal
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You can also do a reality check on your Ct values. In general, a single copy detection occurs by a Ct of 37 in a 20 uL qPCR reaction. Any signal seen later than this is not likely to be real amplification.
Finally, you can also make sure the threshold is going through the exponential phase of the curve. For example, here you see that we have Ct values at 28 and 36, but the curve with the Ct value at 36 is from the plateau, not exponential phase of the curve, so this is not likely real signal.
Automated experimentation has yielded data acquisition rates that supersede human processing capabilities. Artificial Intelligence offers new possibilities for automating data interpretation to generate large, high-quality datasets. Background subtraction is a long-standing challenge, particularly in settings where multiple sources of the background signal coexist, and automatic extraction of signals of interest from measured signals accelerates data interpretation. Herein, we present an unsupervised probabilistic learning approach that analyzes large data collections to identify multiple background sources and establish the probability that any given data point contains a signal of interest. The approach is demonstrated on X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy data and is suitable to any type of data where the signal of interest is a positive addition to the background signals. While the model can incorporate prior knowledge, it does not require knowledge of the signals since the shapes of the background signals, the noise levels, and the signal of interest are simultaneously learned via a probabilistic matrix factorization framework. Automated identification of interpretable signals by unsupervised probabilistic learning avoids the injection of human bias and expedites signal extraction in large datasets, a transformative capability with many applications in the physical sciences and beyond.
Data analysis and interpretation are pervasive in physical sciences research and typically involve information extraction from noisy and background-containing signals.1,2,3 Examples from materials science include the identification of crystal structures from X-ray diffraction patterns4 and chemical species from X-ray photoelectron spectra.5 Distinguishing the signal of interest from background signals comprises a major hurdle, and any errors in making these distinctions can alter data interpretation.6,7 The identification of the signal of interest often requires expert knowledge8,9 and/or application of empirical algorithms, motivating the establishment of a more principled approach.
An example of principled background removal in physical sciences concerns the Bremsstrahlung radiation observed in energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS),10,11 which provides an ideal situation for background identification because there is a single primary background source whose shape can be derived from fundamental physics.10,11,12,13 On the other hand, measurements such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) typically involve a variety of background sources. The background sources of measured X-ray intensities can include scattering by air, elastic scattering by the sample, and scattering by the substrate or sample support, which appear in the detector signal in combination with the desired inelastic scattering from the sample of interest. Furthermore, a given background signal may be attenuated differently over a set of measurements, but it always provides a non-zero contribution to the measured signal. Since the level of these different background signals can vary independently, it is not possible to identify a single characteristic background pattern, motivating the establishment of a multi-component model. Raman spectroscopy similarly involves a variety of background sources. Herein, XRD and Raman data are used as specific examples in which the measured signal is the combination of positive intensities including the signal of interest and any number of background signals.
Empirical background subtraction models6,7,14,15 typically require manual fine tuning of parameters. For example, the XRD background subtraction algorithm from Sonneveld and Visser6 requires parameters for the smoothness of the data and the magnitude of the intensity gradients for peaks of interest. Though the algorithm can be implemented effectively, as reflected by its incorporation into several commercial software packages for XRD analysis, users still need to fine-tune the parameters to avoid distortion of the peaks of interest and overestimation of the background signal.
Further, as is shown in the current work, there are complex background signals which defy approaches based on fitting a background model to a single spectrogram at a time. More recently, background identification through analysis of a collection of measurements has been performed using methods such as principal component analysis (PCA)16 or polynomial fitting,15 which still require expert knowledge in discriminating background from signal and do not guarantee non-negativity of the extracted signal.
Two representative samples from the 186 XRD measurements that were collectively used to establish the multi-component background. Each measured signal is shown along with the inferred background, which contains 3 diffraction peaks from the substrate that are much larger in intensity than those of the sample of interest. This measurement-specific inferred background produces a net signal that intentionally retains the measurement noise so that the signal from each sample of interest can be interpreted in the context of the measurement noise. In a. a series of relatively small peaks are recovered from the background-dominated signal. In b. similar signal recovery is obtained even when peaks of interest strongly overlap with peaks in the background signal
Continued demonstration of MCBL proceeds with a Raman spectroscopy dataset where 2121 metal oxide samples spanning 15 pseudo-quaternary metal oxide composition spaces (5 elements including oxygen but systematic variation of the concentrations of only the 4 metals yields dimensionality of a quaternary composition space) were measured using a rapid Raman scanning technique described previously.19 Similar to the XRD dataset, the Raman signal from the substrate varies in intensity with sample composition, and the high sensitivity of Raman detectors to environmental factors such as room temperature introduces additional variability in background signal. Data acquisition proceeded over a week, during which time-dependent variation in signal levels were observed. These occur, for example, due to day to night temperature variation in the laboratory. While we expect the background to be smooth, a closed mathematical expression is not available, making this dataset well matched to the capabilities of the MCBL model. As discussed in the Methods section, limiting each of the background signals to be smooth makes the results relatively insensitive to the number of background sources included in the model, provided this number is at least as large as the true number of background sources. Since we expect that several sources may be present, 16 is a convenient upper bound and is a standard value to use for datasets where more specific knowledge of the background sources is unavailable.
To highlight the quality of the net signals produced by the MCBL model, the measurement of Fig. 2c is shown in Fig. 2d along with traditional polynomial baseline modeling. The lower-order polynomial yields a net signal where the largest peak is actually from a background source, and increasing the polynomial order to capture this feature in the background model results in removal of practically all signal from the sample.
To further illustrate the background removal and peak identification process, Fig. 3 includes a series of ten of the Raman measurements with a variety of peak locations, shapes, and relationships to the background signal. Since the signal probability is calculated for every data point, the probability signals can be plotted in the same manner as the measured signals, as shown in Fig. 3b. The background-subtracted samples in Fig. 3c are shown with partial transparency where the probability signal is below the 50% threshold so that the regions of each pattern that likely contain signal from the sample are highlighted. The sharp, intense peaks in the top two patterns may be easily identified by a variety of algorithms, although identification of many of the broader, weaker features from each sample require the excellent background identification and probabilistic reasoning of the MCBL model.
Stack plots containing 10 measurements from the set of 2121 measured Raman signals, chosen based on variation in observed Raman signal from the sample. The measured signals in a. were analyzed collectively with the full dataset to derive a comprehensive background model, including the probability signals indicating the likelihood that each data point contains signal from the sample (b), and the background-subtracted signals (c). These latter signals contain the modeled signal from the sample, as well as measured noise, and the opaque data points are those whose probability signal is above the 0.5 threshold, providing the user a clear visualization of the signals of interest
The classification of measured signals as lacking or containing a signal of interest has a variety of applications ranging from materials discovery to characterization of the background sources. Using the rank 16 background model, 743 of the 2121 measured signals contain at least one datapoint that is likely to contain signal of interest. Using this as the baseline classification of absence or presence of signal from the sample, the performance of lower-rank models can be assessed via the recall (the fraction of the 743 patterns with signal that are correctly identified as having signal) and the precision (the fraction of signals with detected signal that actually have signal). The results are summarized in Fig. 4a and demonstrate the poor performance of the rank 1 model for this classification task, which is due to a confluence of phenomena including that noted above; non-removed background signal can be interpreted as signal of interest (false positive), and the inflated noise level in the noise model can fail to identify small signals of interest (false negative). Increasing to rank 2 greatly improves the recall but not the precision, and increasing to rank 4 largely removes the disparity between recall and precision. Since there is no substantial change upon increasing to rank 8, these results collectively indicate that the number of background sources is three or four. It is worth noting that multiple components are needed to model a single background source if its signal varies in shape over the dataset, so this interpretation of rank as determine the number of sources includes the number of unique physical phenomena that alter the shape of a background signal. The background sources can be further characterized using the wealth of information provided by the MCBL model, such as the spatial or temporal variation in the intensity of each background source. 59ce067264