Gel image segmentation based on discontinuity and region information

Abstract

2-D electrophoresis gel images can be used for identifying and characterizing many forms of a particular protein encoded by a single gene. Conventional approaches to gel analysis require the three steps: (1) Spot detection on each gel; (2) Spot matching between gels; and (3) Spot quantification and comparison. Many researchers and developers attempt to automate all steps as much as possible, but errors in the detection and matching stages are common. In order to carry out gel image analysis, one first needs to accurately detect and measure the protein spots in a gel image. As other image analysis or computer vision areas, image segmentation is still a hard problem. This paper presents algorithms for automatically delineating gel spots. Two types of segmentation algorithms were implemented, the one is edge (discontinuity) based type, and the other is region based type. For the different classes of gel images, the two types of algorithms were tested; the advantages and disadvantages were discussed. Based on the testing and analysis results, authors suggested using a fusion of edge information and region information for gel image segmentation is a good complementary. The primary integration of the two types of image segmentation algorithms have been tested too, the result clearly show that the integrated algorithm can automatically delineate gel not only on a simple image and also on a complex image, and it is much better than that either only edge based algorithm or only region based algorithm.