Multilevel Segmentation Optimized by Physical Information for Gridding of Microarray Images

As one of the great advances in modern technology, the microarray is widely used in many fields, including biomedical research, clinical diagnosis, and so on. Evidently, in order to extract the intensity of fluorescence bio-probes accurately, we need to pay special attention to the gridding of microarray at first. To solve the poor effect of the traditional Otsu method for microarray gridding, an innovative algorithm of Otsu optimized by multilevel thresholds is proposed to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the microarray image gridding and segmentation. The experimental results indicate that considering the physical information carried by microarrays, the improved algorithm of Otsu optimized by multilevel thresholds achieves high-quality gridding and establishes the bio-spot coordinates more precisely. Compared with the traditional Otsu method, its gridding error is reduced to zero, and the integrated relative error of bio-spot coordinates is decreased from 2.89% to 1.05%. This optimization of Otsu combined with physical information of spot-matrix will greatly improve the performance of segmentation so as to make the contribution to extracting the fluorescence intensity of microarray accurately.