A New Method of Gridding for Spot Detection in Microarray Images

Abstract

A Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) microarray is a collection of microscopic DNA spots attached to a solid surface, such as glass, plastic or silicon chip forming an array. The analysis of DNA microarray images allows the identification of gene expressions to draw biological conclusions for applications ranging from genetic profiling to diagnosis of cancer. The DNA microarray image analysis includes three tasks: gridding, segmentation and intensity extraction. The gridding process is usually divided into two main steps: sub-gridding and spot detection. In this paper, a fully automatic approach to detect the location of spots is proposed. Each spot is associated with a gene and contains the pixels that indicate the level of expression of that particular gene. After gridding, the image is segmented using fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for separation of spots from the background pixels.  The result of the experiment shows that the method presented in this paper is accurate and automatic without human intervention and parameter presetting.

Keywords: Microarray Image, Mathematical Morphology, Image Processing