Fully-Automated Spot Recognition and Quantification from cDNA MicroArray Images

摘要

We have developed a powerful image analysis tool for cDNA microarray images. cDNA microarray is one of the methods to simultaneously monitor a large number of gene expressions under various environmental conditions. The essential problems of image analysis for microarray are to locate spots and measure their respective intensity. Our tool uses a combination of some image processing operators including rolling ball, laplacian filter and so on, are used for solving these problems. Experimental result shows that our method can find not only normal spots but also overlapped spots as flagged spots with no human interventions. Moreover, it takes only eight minutes for one image set, while it takes one or two hours for visual inspection in interactive systems.