A Distortion Metric for the Lossy Compression of DNA Microarray Images

Abstract

DNA micro arrays are state-of-the-art tools in biological and medical research. In this work, we discuss the suitability of lossy compression for DNA micro array images and highlight the necessity for a distortion metric to assess the loss of relevant information. We also propose one possible metric that considers the basic image features employed by most DNA micro array analysis techniques. Experimental results indicate that the proposed metric can identify and differentiate important and unimportant changes in DNA micro array images.