Fully automatic procedure for accurate spot addressing in microarray images

LARESE, MÓNICA G.; GÓMEZ, JUAN C.

Santa Fe, Argentina

Conferencia; 34° Conferencia Latinoamericana de Informática (CLEI 2008); 2008

In this paper a novel procedure based on texture spatial characterization techniques is proposed aimed at automatically addressing spots in microarray images. The algorithm relies on the regular and pseudo-periodic patterns of spots (texture primitives). An automatic pro cedure is proposed to segment the autocorrelation functions of subgrid images and accurately determine the locations of the peaks. These candidate peaks (vectors) are next used to compute the displacement vectors that fully characterize the spatial arrangement of spots, describing the spot spacing and angle of rotation of the pattern. A refinement procedure is then applied to improve the accuracy of the norms and angles of thedisplacement vectors based on the frequency distribution of the regions of dominance of the candidate vectors. Experiments based on artificial and real images are encouraging and show improvements regarding robustness against image rotations, and accuracy, over results provided by state-of-the-art methods.