A new method for DNA microarray image segmentation

Abstract

One of the key issues in microarray analysis is to extract quantitative information from the spots, which represents gene expression levels in the experiments. The process of identifying the spots and separating the foreground from the background is known as microarray image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a new approach to microarray image segmentation, which we called the adaptive ellipse method, and shows various advantages when compared to the adaptive circle method. Our experiments on real-life microarray images show that adaptive ellipse is capable of extracting information from the images, which is ignored by the traditional adaptive circle method, and hence showing more flexibility. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.