A multi-view approach to cDNA micro-array analysis

The official published version can be obtained from the link below.Microarray has emerged as a powerful technology that enables biologists to study thousands of genes simultaneously, therefore, to obtain a better understanding of the gene interaction and regulation mechanisms. This paper is concerned with improving the processes involved in the analysis of microarray image data. The main focus is to clarify an image's feature space in an unsupervised manner. In this paper, the Image Transformation Engine (ITE), combined with different filters, is investigated. The proposed methods are applied to a set of real-world cDNA images. The MatCNN toolbox is used during the segmentation process. Quantitative comparisons between different filters are carried out. It is shown that the CLD filter is the best one to be applied with the ITE.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the National Science Foundation of China under Innovative Grant 70621001, Chinese Academy of Sciences under Innovative Group Overseas Partnership Grant, the BHP Billiton Cooperation of Australia Grant, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project of China under Grant 2009DFA32050 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Automatic gridding of microarray images based on spatial constrained K-means and Voronoi diagrams

Images from complementary DNA (cDNA) microarrays need to be processed automatically due to the huge amount of information that they provide. In addition, automatic processing is also required to implement batch processes able to manage large image databases. Most of existing softwares for microarray image processing are semiautomatic, and they usually need user intervention to select several parameters such as positional marks on the grids, or to correct the results of different stages of the automatic processing. On the other hand, many of the available automatic algorithms fail when dealing with rotated images or misaligned grids. In this work, a novel automatic algorithm for cDNA image gridding based on spatial constrained K-means and Voronoi diagrams is presented. The proposed algorithm consists of several steps, viz., image denoising by means of median filtering, spot segmentation using Canny edge detector and morphological reconstruction, and gridding based on spatial constrained K-means and Voronoi diagrams computation. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated on microarray images from public databases yielding promising results. The algorithm was compared with other existing methods and it shows to be more robust to rotations and misalignments of the grids.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Automated segmentation of tissue images for computerized IHC analysis

This paper presents two automated methods for the segmentation ofimmunohistochemical tissue images that overcome the limitations of themanual approach aswell as of the existing computerized techniques. The first independent method, based on unsupervised color clustering, recognizes automatically the target cancerous areas in the specimen and disregards the stroma; the second method, based on colors separation and morphological processing, exploits automated segmentation of the nuclear membranes of the cancerous cells. Extensive experimental results on real tissue images demonstrate the accuracy of our techniques compared to manual segmentations; additional experiments show that our techniques are more effective in immunohistochemical images than popular approaches based on supervised learning or active contours. The proposed procedure can be exploited for any applications that require tissues and cells exploration and to perform reliable and standardized measures of the activity of specific proteins involved in multi-factorial genetic pathologie

How to understand the cell by breaking it: network analysis of gene perturbation screens

Modern high-throughput gene perturbation screens are key technologies at the forefront of genetic research. Combined with rich phenotypic descriptors they enable researchers to observe detailed cellular reactions to experimental perturbations on a genome-wide scale. This review surveys the current state-of-the-art in analyzing perturbation screens from a network point of view. We describe approaches to make the step from the parts list to the wiring diagram by using phenotypes for network inference and integrating them with complementary data sources. The first part of the review describes methods to analyze one- or low-dimensional phenotypes like viability or reporter activity; the second part concentrates on high-dimensional phenotypes showing global changes in cell morphology, transcriptome or proteome.Comment: Review based on ISMB 2009 tutorial; after two rounds of revisio

Joint co-clustering: co-clustering of genomic and clinical bioimaging data

AbstractFor better understanding the genetic mechanisms underlying clinical observations, and better defining a group of potential candidates for protein-family-inhibiting therapy, it is interesting to determine the correlations between genomic, clinical data and data coming from high resolution and fluorescent microscopy. We introduce a computational method, called joint co-clustering, that can find co-clusters or groups of genes, bioimaging parameters and clinical traits that are believed to be closely related to each other based on the given empirical information. As bioimaging parameters, we quantify the expression of growth factor receptor EGFR/erb-B family in non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) through a fully-automated computer-aided analysis approach. This immunohistochemical analysis is usually performed by pathologists via visual inspection of tissue samples images. Our fully-automated techniques streamlines this error-prone and time-consuming process, thereby facilitating analysis and diagnosis. Experimental results for several real-life datasets demonstrate the high quantitative precision of our approach. The joint co-clustering method was tested with the receptor EGFR/erb-B family data on non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) tissue and identified statistically significant co-clusters of genes, receptor protein expression and clinical traits. The validation of our results with the literature suggest that the proposed method can provide biologically meaningful co-clusters of genes and traits and that it is a very promising approach to analyse large-scale biological data and to study multi-factorial genetic pathologies through their genetic alterations

A New Method of Gridding for Spot Detection in Microarray Images

A Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) microarray is a collection of microscopic DNA spots attached to a solid surface, such as glass, plastic or silicon chip forming an array. The analysis of DNA microarray images allows the identification of gene expressions to draw biological conclusions for applications ranging from genetic profiling to diagnosis of cancer. The DNA microarray image analysis includes three tasks: gridding, segmentation and intensity extraction. The gridding process is usually divided into two main steps: sub-gridding and spot detection. In this paper, a fully automatic approach to detect the location of spots is proposed. Each spot is associated with a gene and contains the pixels that indicate the level of expression of that particular gene. After gridding, the image is segmented using fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm for separation of spots from the background pixels.  The result of the experiment shows that the method presented in this paper is accurate and automatic without human intervention and parameter presetting. Keywords: Microarray Image, Mathematical Morphology, Image Processin

Automated Discrimination of Pathological Regions in Tissue Images: Unsupervised Clustering vs Supervised SVM Classification

Recognizing and isolating cancerous cells from non pathological tissue areas (e.g. connective stroma) is crucial for fast and objective immunohistochemical analysis of tissue images. This operation allows the further application of fully-automated techniques for quantitative evaluation of protein activity, since it avoids the necessity of a preventive manual selection of the representative pathological areas in the image, as well as of taking pictures only in the pure-cancerous portions of the tissue. In this paper we present a fully-automated method based on unsupervised clustering that performs tissue segmentations highly comparable with those provided by a skilled operator, achieving on average an accuracy of 90%. Experimental results on a heterogeneous dataset of immunohistochemical lung cancer tissue images demonstrate that our proposed unsupervised approach overcomes the accuracy of a theoretically superior supervised method such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) by 8%

Microarray spot partitioning by autonoumsly organising maps thorugh contour model

In cDNA microarray image analysis, classification of pixels as forefront area and the area covered by background is very challenging. In microarray experimentation, identifying forefront area of desired spots is nothing but computation of forefront pixels concentration, area covered by spot and shape of the spots. In this piece of writing, an innovative way for spot partitioning of microarray images using autonomously organizing maps (AOM) method through C-V model has been proposed. Concept of neural networks has been incorpated to train and to test microarray spots.In a trained AOM the comprehensive information arising from the prototypes of created neurons are clearly integrated to decide whether to get smaller or get bigger of contour. During the process of optimization, this is done in an iterative manner. Next using C-V model, inside curve area of trained spot is compared with test spot finally curve fitting is done.The presented model can handle spots with variations in terms of shape and quality of the spots and meanwhile it is robust to the noise. From the review of experimental work, presented approach is accurate over the approaches like C-means by fuzzy, Morphology sectionalization