A novel neural network approach to cDNA microarray image segmentation

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier.Microarray technology has become a great source of information for biologists to understand the workings of DNA which is one of the most complex codes in nature. Microarray images typically contain several thousands of small spots, each of which represents a different gene in the experiment. One of the key steps in extracting information from a microarray image is the segmentation whose aim is to identify which pixels within an image represent which gene. This task is greatly complicated by noise within the image and a wide degree of variation in the values of the pixels belonging to a typical spot. In the past there have been many methods proposed for the segmentation of microarray image. In this paper, a new method utilizing a series of artificial neural networks, which are based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Kohonen networks, is proposed. The proposed method is applied to a set of real-world cDNA images. Quantitative comparisons between the proposed method and commercial software GenePix(®) are carried out in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). This method is shown to not only deliver results comparable and even superior to existing techniques but also have a faster run time.This work was funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61174136 and 61104041, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China under Grant BK2011598, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project of China under Grant No. 2011DFA12910, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Automating the processing of cDNA microarray images

This work is concerned with the development of an automatic image processing tool for DNA microarray images. This paper proposes, implements and tests a new tool for cDNA image analysis. The DNAs are imaged as thousands of circularly shaped objects (spots) on the microarray image and the purpose of this tool is to correctly address their location, segment the pixels belonging to spots and extract the quality features of each spot. Techniques used for addressing, segmentation and feature extraction of spots are described in detail. The results obtained with the proposed tool are systematically compared with conventional cDNA microarray analysis software tools

Standard and specific compression techniques for DNA microarray images

We review the state of the art in DNA microarray image compression and provide original comparisons between standard and microarray-specific compression techniques that validate and expand previous work. First, we describe the most relevant approaches published in the literature and classify them according to the stage of the typical image compression process where each approach makes its contribution, and then we summarize the compression results reported for these microarray-specific image compression schemes. In a set of experiments conducted for this paper, we obtain new results for several popular image coding techniques that include the most recent coding standards. Prediction-based schemes CALIC and JPEG-LS are the best-performing standard compressors, but are improved upon by the best microarray-specific technique, Battiato's CNN-based scheme

BeadDataPackR: A Tool to Facilitate the Sharing of Raw Data from Illumina BeadArray Studies

Microarray technologies have been an increasingly important tool in cancer research in the last decade, and a number of initiatives have sought to stress the importance of the provision and sharing of raw microarray data. Illumina BeadArrays provide a particular problem in this regard, as their random construction simultaneously adds value to analysis of the raw data and obstructs the sharing of those data