An Efficient Fully Automated Method for Gridding Microarray Images

Abstract

DNA microarray is a powerful tool and is widely used in genetics to monitor expression levels of thousands of genes in parallel. The gene expression process consists of three stages: gridding, segmentation and quantification. Grid- ding deals with finding areas in the microarray image which contain one spot using grid lines. This step can be done ma- nually or automatically. In this paper, we propose an efficient and simple automatic gridding method for microarray image analysis. This method was implemented using MATLAB software and found very effective for gridding arrays with low intensity, poor quality spotsand tested by a number of microarray images. Results show that this method gives high accu- racy of 76.9% improved to 98.6% when a preprocessing step is considered, rendering the method a promising technique for an efficient and automatic gridding the noisy microarray images.