Automated microarray Image Gridding Using Image Projection Vectors Coupled with Power Spectrum Model

Microarray technology has been increasingly recognized as a powerful means for monitoring the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. Microarray image processing is an essential aspect of microarray experiment, of which gridding is thought to be the most important step of spot recognition. Many times, microarray image gridding requires assisted intervention to achieve the acceptable accuracy. In this paper, an automatic microarray image gridding algorithm was presented by using image projection vectors together with power spectrum model. For obtaining grid position, the image projection vectors were utilized by adequately considering the grid parameters. On the other hand, as a preprocessing procedure of microarray gridding, detection of the grid rotation was involved in our study by using power spectrum analyses of the image projection vectors. Our approach has been evaluated by three different microarray datasets. Experimental comparisons with up-to-date approaches by using both synthetic and real image data are demonstrated. The gridding result was shown to be very accurate, and able to provide correct gridding dataset for the downstream microarray analyses. In summary, our study demonstrated the combination of image projection vectors with power spectrum model as a powerful strategy for microarray image gridding.