Chromosome classification based on the band profile similarity along approximate medial axis

Abstract

Automated chromosome classification is an essential task in cytogenetics and has been an important pattern recognition problem. Numerous attempts were made in the past to characterize chromosomes for the purposes of clinical and cancer cytogenetics research. It is important to determine good features and develop feature extraction schemes for chromosome classification. In this paper we propose efficient approaches for medial axis determination and profile matching of human chromosomes without identifying centromeres. The medial axis determination is based on simple cross-section analysis. The features of the band profile obtained along the axis are then used to classify a chromosome based on a subsequence matching technique. Using a special indexing structure, we are able to perform fast similarity search and dynamic insertion and deletion over the established subsequence database of chromosome profiles. According to the experimental results, the developed adaptive system can automatically and efficiently determine the medial axis of a given chromosomes, and achieve satisfactory classification results.