A 2-D gel electrophoresis DNA image analysis algorithm with automatic thresholding

摘要

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and gel electrophoresis are two widely used techniques for genetic studies that require the bench scientist to perform many tedious manual steps. Advances in automation are making these techniques more accessible, but detection and image analysis still remain labor-intensive. Although several commercial software packages are now available, DNA image analysis still requires some intervention by the user, and thus a certain level of image processing expertise. To allow researchers to speed up their analyses and obtain more repeatable results, we present a fully automated image analysis system for DNA or protein studies with high accuracy. The proposed system is based mainly on four steps: automatic thresholding, shifting, filtering, and processing. The automatic thresholding that is used to equalize the gray values of the gel electrophoreses image background is one of the key and novel operations in this algorithm. An enhancement is also used to improve poor quality images that have faint DNA bands. Experimental results show that the proposed method eliminates defects due to noise for good and average quality gel electrophoresis images, while it also improves the appearance of poor quality images.