Intelligent Spot Detection for 2-DE Gel Image

Abstract

Abstract. In this study, a novel method for spot detection is proposed with the addition of confidence evaluation for each detected spot. The confidence of a spot will give useful hints for subsequent processing such as landmark selection, spot quantification, gel image registration, etc. The proposed method takes slices of a gel image in the gray level direction and build them into a slice tree, which in turn is used to perform spot detection and confidence evaluation. Moreover, the proposed method is fast. Building slice tree for a gel image of 1262×720 take about 3.2 sec. Spot detection take about 66 ms after the slice tree was built. Experimental results show that confidence values are close to subjective judgement.