A simple segmentation method for DNA microarray spots by kernel density estimation

摘要

The DNA microarray analysis is one of the most important areas in biomedical research. For the accurate analysis of microarray data the process of segmentation, classification of pixels as foreground or background, should be done accurately. In this paper we suggest a kernel density estimation approach for the segmentation of the microarray spot. We estimate the density of n pixel intensities for a given target area by the kernel density estimation, and the resulting kernel density estimate gives bimodal density by appropriate choice of the smoothing parameter. We suggest two modes of the kernel density estimate for n pixel intensities as estimates of the foreground (mode with larger value) and the background (mode with smaller value) intensity, respectively. The segmentation method proposed in this paper is easy and simple to use, robust to the shape of spot, and very accurate.