Microarray is considered an important instrument and powerful new technologyfor large-scale gene sequence and gene expression analysis. One of the majorchallenges of this technique is the image processing phase. The accuracy ofthis phase has an important impact on the accuracy and effectiveness of thesubsequent gene expression and identification analysis. The processing can beorganized mainly into four steps: gridding, spot isolation, segmentation, andquantification. Although several commercial software packages are nowavailable, microarray image analysis still requires some intervention by theuser, and thus a certain level of image processing expertise. This paperdescribes and compares four techniques that perform automatic gridding and spotisolation. The proposed techniques are based on template matching technique,standard deviation, sum, and derivative of these profiles. Experimental resultsshow that the accuracy of the derivative of the sum profile is highly accuratecompared to other techniques for good and poor quality microarray images.
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