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The complexity of the spot patterns of two-dimensional electrophoresis gels made it necessary to use image processing techniques to analyze the gels. An important issue in the analysis is the detection and quantification of the protein spots. In this paper we describe a new technique to segment and model the different spots. For the segmentation of a gel into its different spot regions we apply a watershed technique, which is robust and efficient. For the quantification of the spots, a new spot model is constructed, based on diffusion principles. Besides the advantage of having a physical interpretation, the model is demonstrated to be superior to the commonly used Gaussian models.

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1. IntroductionThe definition of resolution as introduced by Lord Rayleigh [1] is related to the width of the point spread function of the imaging device. In this definition, noise has not been taken into account. Another definition of resolution has been introduced by Rose [2] in the field of radar and TV. Here the resolution is defined in terms of the dose (D) (i.e. number of imaging particles per unit area) and the signal to noise ratio SNR (i.e. the minimal contrast) A third definition of resolution is based on the idea that the microscope is a communication channel between the object and the observer. The resolution can then be rephrased as the amount of information that is transmitted by the channel in the sense as defined by Shannon [3] as a number of bits per unit area. This definition however does not describe how this information can be deduced and what its precision is.