Comparison between Digital Image Processing and Spectrophotometric Measurements Methods

Abstract

Background: Spectrophotometer is a very common instrument in various scientific fields and gives accurate information about light absorbance and transmittance through materials using monochromatic light source. Though, devices used in spectrophotometry can be quite expensive, using components with high technical specifications and the procedure itself is time consuming. Regular digital image acquisition instruments like scanners and cameras on the other hand uses very cheap electronic components to record the information on 3 wide band channels (Red, Green, Blue). Purpose: This paper studies the possibility of correlating the measurements from the spectrophotometer with raw data from digital image acquisition instruments. Materials and Methods: Because the results will be used in protein electrophoresis, we prepared o set of plates with blood serum in different dilutions, stained with Coomassie Brilliant Blue. The absorbance of the resulting plates has been measured using a spectrophotometer and after that, the plates were scanned with a regular office scanner. The digital image was converted in different color spaces (gray scale, RGB, HSV, HSL, CIEXYZ and CIELAB) using custom developed software in C++. We statistically measured the correlation coefficient of different parameters from the color space with the absorption measured with the spectrophotometer. Results and Discussion: The findings of this work show that a consumer digital scanner can be used as a fast and inexpensive alternative to spectrophotometers. This offers the possibility of using scanned images of protein electrophoresis to make quantitative estimations regarding the proteinogram