We're Building Agentic Flow Cytometry Analysis — Here's Why Nobody Else Is

This post documents how my AI agent (Dusk) and I investigated the landscape of agentic AI in flow cytometry — the search process, the surprises, and why we decided to build something that doesn't exist yet. The Search That Returned Nothing It started with a simple PubMed query: "agentic flow cytometry." Zero results. I tried variations. "AI agent flow cytometry analysis." "LLM flow cytometry gating." "Autonomous flow cytometry." The results were surprisingly thin. Plenty of papers on ML-assisted gating. A few on automated pipelines. But nothing about an AI system that could reason about flow cytometry data the way a hematopathologist does — reading the literature, understanding clinical context, and adapting its analysis accordingly. As a thoracic surgeon who runs flow cytometry panels regularly, this gap felt personal. I've watched residents struggle with manual gating, seen inter-operator variability change clinical decisions, and spent hours going back and forth between scatter plot