What's New in FCS Express 7?
FCS Express 7 is the result of close collaborations between De Novo Software and scientists around the world. Version 7 builds on 20+ years of experience in flow and image cytometry data analysis. Customers have asked for new visualizations for experiments, easier ways to distill highly multi-parametric data sets, more speed, and many other improvements to help facilitate getting results. The team at De Novo Software has responded with the latest release of the FCS Express legacy. Please read about some of the new and exciting features below and see our extensive list of improvements in the FCS Express 7 release notes.
FCS Express RUO version 7.26.0020 was released May 9th, 2025 including some of the major enhancements below and many bug fixes.
Plot Usability
- Added sliders on the plot axes for adjusting compensation.
- For binned plots, Axis Range and Axis Resolution have been consolidated into a single option in the Axis formatting dialog.
- Simplified right-click menu on layout objects.
User Interface
- Hide the Text tab in the Ribbon Bar when it is not relevant.
- Moved snapshot-related buttons on the ribbon to Batch & Export tab.
Batch Processing
- Consolidated Run and Rerun buttons into a single Run button, which now follows the "Apply Iteration Snapshots" option.
Integration for Spectral Data
- Integrate with EasyPanel to generate comparisons of spectra with reference controls.
Compatibility
And much more! Please see the full release notes for additional details.
FCS Express RUO version 7.24.0024 was released December 18th, 2024 including some of the major enhancements below and many bug fixes.
Quadrant gates
- Ability to choose how to import quadrants from old layout
- Quad-Quad linking and Quad-Gate linking are now available
- More flexibility in naming newly-created quads
- Ability to create quadrants hierarchically or not
Batch Processing
- Ability to export the full contents of an FCS Express spreadsheet.
- Ability to export to Dotmatics Luma
Validation Ready
- Added the option for administrators to set the default user options that are used for option resets and new users
Plot aesthetics
- Modernized default appearance of plots
Usability
- Sliders can now be used directly on plots to change the axis scale.
- A warning will now be displayed on the plot if a configurable percent of cells (by default 5%) are out of range.
- Plots can now be deleted directly from an editing state if nothing on the plot is selected.
- Can now change the plot's gate by clicking in the plot's title.
Performance
- Optimized data loading using local caching for network files.
- Enhanced live-updating that automatically turns off only for slow gates.
Tokens and Statistics
- Added titles to statistics grids
- Default statistics naming options updated (gate name will be prefixed)
- Ability to create a report to list the tokens being displayed on layout pages
And much more! Please see the full release notes for additional details.
FCS Express RUO version 7.22.0006 was released April 17, 2024 including some of the major enhancements below and many bug fixes.
Usability
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- Added a border around plots and statistics grids when one or the other is selected to indicate a relationship
- Allow users to type the page name into the "change page" dialog in order to switch to that page
- Moved Export to PDF/PPT/Picture to the Batch ribbon tab
- Renamed the tab to be Batch & Export
- Reorganized Batch Processing icons on the tab
- Reorganized buttons in the Insert tab to improve accessibility of frequently used plot types
- Added new report to show which permissions are in each security group
Other improvements
- Updated default appearance of Multicycle plots
- Added explanations into the statistics selection window
And much more! Please see the full release notes for version 7.22.0006 for additional details.
FCS Express RUO version 7.20.0023 (inclusive of 7.20.0020) was released February 26, 2024 including some of the major enhancements below and many bug fixes.
Learn more in our short video below
- Added the ability to create Prism files through Batch Process
- Quadrants now share the same architecture and underlying implementation as gates.
Performance
- Improved speed launching FCS Express and opening layouts.
- Improved zooming on picture plots.
- Sped up loading users list when using an internet dongle
Tips for new users
- Added guidance text on blank layout pages when no objects have been placed on the page yet
- Added hint for using newly created gates to create gated plots
- Improved the format of the file relocation dialog.
Usability
- Improve drag&drop experience with objects within the layout.
- Gate Text boxes are automatically recreated when gates are shown via right-click.
- When files are dragged into the layout, they are automatically added to the Data List even if it is not empty.
- Allow easier use of parameter groups to specify export parameters in the "Data > Export" window
- Provides a warning that reordering the data list will trigger iteration snapshots to get deleted
- Simplified and improved the Gate Navigator.
- A new gate will automatically be displayed when it is created
- Removed categorizing nodes if there are no subnodes.
- Added a menu item in the Gate View/Navigator to lock gates to only being moved on a single plot
Other improvements
- Added percentile statistics for X and Y for 2D plots
- Improved the user options for Attune Cytpix Image data files.
- Allows more complex passwords.
And much more! Please see the full release notes for version 7.20.0020 for additional details.
New functionality from previous FCS Express 7 releases below
7.18.0015 was released May 2023 including some of the major enhancements below and many bug fixes.
Research customers who purchased standalone (including internet dongle) FCS Express Flow or Image licenses in the past, will now have access to all product features for both Flow and Image, and also to the High Content and Advanced Multicycle add-ons. Learn more...
- New Logo
- Support for MacOS 13.3 (Ventura) and greater
- Gate Navigator and Data List will be displayed by default on new layouts
- Added toolbar buttons to Gate Navigator
- Simplified appearance of Create Gate dialog
- Added icons to the plot type selection dialog displayed after dragging and dropping data files
- The Format Ribbon Tab will now only appear when a layout object is selected
- Updated Help Ribbon Tab
- Improved panning and zooming on picture plots
- Added Proxy support
- Spectrum plots improvements:
- When adding overlays on spectrum plots, the new overlays will show the same spectrum as the base overlay
- Added Median as an option in the Overlay to Show options for Spectrum plots
- Added Aurora CS to the Instrument Specific Settings
- Added ability for classification output parameters to be treated as numeric within Pipelines
And much more! Please see the full release notes for version 7.18.0015 for additional details.
7.16.0035 was released November 2022 including some of the major enhancements below and many bug fixes.
- Improvements for Mac M1 compatibility and performance
- New Notes tool added
- New color levels for Density and Contour plots (Inferno, Magma, Plasma, Viridis)
- No Gate root gate added to hierarchies
- Classification Folders add the ability to run pipeline steps independently on each data set within a merged file (learn more in our recent webinar)
- Greater control over axis line formatting
- Speed optimizations for Mac, well gates, applying transformations, loading CellProfiler data sets, and more
- New default instrument specific settings for Bigfoot instrument
- Improvements to pipeline steps
- Improvements to tokens including customized token error text and improved time format compatibility
And much more! Please see the full release notes for version 7.16.0035 for additional details.
Version 7.14.0020 was released in June 2022 and included some of the major updates listed below:
- Phenograph and Lovuain Communities
- ThermoFisher .TMO file compatibility
- Instrument specific settings for Fluidigm CytofXT
- New statistics naming options
- Ability to show/hide gates in views/navigators
- Speed improvements for NxN, KNN, Heatmaps, tSNE, and unmixing
- Overall speed improvements
- Improvements to audit trails
- Added password complexity requirements to security systems
- Color by parameter multi-plot options for heatmaps
- Additional gate hierarchy expand and collapse options
- Keyword dropdown dialog with recently used keywords
FCS Express 7.12.0005 was released in December 2021 shortly after the release of 7.10.0007. Updates below are inclusive of both releases. The release contains compatibility, performance, new feature improvements. The latest update provides:
- ARM-based Mac "M1" computer support
- macOS 12.x Monterey support
- Allows for hyperlinking to layouts; URL; and other documents
- Enables ability to view the data source of tokens
- Progress bar and mid-run cancellation feature for data transformations/pipelines
- Improved speed for tSNE and uMAP
- Additional variance based parameter selection pipeline steps
- Jaccard Similarity pipeline step
- Improved automatic identification of compensation controls for Bio-Rad data sets
- and much more...
FCS Express 7.08.0018 was released in July 2021 and contains numerous enhancements based on customer input as well as many performance improvements. The update included new Summary Charts (Beeswarm and Violin), Levey Jennings plots, "live" updating compensation and unmixing, automatic spillover spreading matrix, automatic cross staining index, and many additions to pipelines. Check out the new features from 7.08.0018 below and in our full release notes.
| The new version of FCS Express 7 allows to easily create Summary charts in Violin and Beeswarm style. Both styles may be combined with the already-existing Box and Whisker style.
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Levey Jennings plots allow you to visualize quality control data to ensure test metrics are stable over time and fall within a predetermined range. |
| The new Export to Spreadsheet batch actions allows users to batch statistics directly into integrated spreadsheets to facilitate and speed up formula/chart creation. |  |
The 7.06.0015 release of FCS Express 7 included tons of new functionality and over 100 improvements based on the feedback from cytometry professionals. See what was released below.
Pipelines in FCS Express are a set of data processing steps that stand alone or are connected in series. The output of a step can be applied to a data file or utilized as the input of the next step, or series of steps, that may be applied to your data. No plugins, no programming, just results! See our full list of all available steps.
The vast majority of commonly used algorithms for data analysis are actually pipelines, with tSNE (and its variants) and SPADE being two examples. However, when those algorithms are implemented as a one calculation, user customizations are limited to the what the specific implementation allows. Pipelines in FCS Express increase the computational flexibility and granularity of running algorithms and data transformations while giving users the unique ability to create their own transformations.
A pipeline is made of individual data processing steps with each step performing a specific calculation/transformation. To get started using Pipelines for your analysis TODAY, please click here.
| Pre-defined pipeline steps make accessing commonly used algorithms and data processing steps easy. |  |
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FCS Express provides a wide variety of pipeline steps for you to choose from. See our full list of all available steps and contact us if there are steps you are interested incorporating into FCS Express that are not yet available. |
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