A study on microarray image gridding techniques for DNA analysis

Abstract

Microarray is one of the most promising tools available for researchers in the life sciences to study gene expression profiles. Through microarray analysis, gene expression levels can be obtained, and the biological information of a disease can be identified. The gene expression information embedded in the microarray is extracted using image-processing techniques. Gridding is one of the important processes used to extract features in DNA microarray, by assigning each spot in the microarray with individual coordinates for further data interpretation. This paper evaluates popular techniques of DNA microarray image gridding in the literature with an emphasis on gridding accuracy, speed, and the ability to remove noise. Based on our evaluation, the Otsu method can provide a better performance in terms of processing speed, accuracy, and ability to remove noise compared to other methods discussed in this paper.