A Novel Dual-Core Architecture for the Analysis of DNA Microarray Images

A deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) microarray is a collection of microscopic DNA spots attached to a solid surface, such as a glass, plastic, or silicon chip forming an array. DNA microarray technologies are an essential part of modern biomedical research. DNA microarray allows compressing hundreds of thousands of different DNA nucleotide sequences in a little microscope glass and permits having all this information on a single image. 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. Unfortunately, DNA microarray technology has a high variation of data quality. Therefore, to obtain reliable results, complex and extensive image analysis algorithms should be applied before the actual DNA microarray information can be used for biomedical purposes. In this paper, we present a novel hardware architecture that is specifically designed to analyze DNA microarray images. The architecture is based on a dual-core system that implements several units working in a single-instruction/multiple-data fashion. A field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA)-based prototypal implementation of the proposed architecture is presented. The effectiveness of the novel dual-core architecture is demonstrated by several analyses performed on original DNA microarray images, showing that the capability of detecting DNA spots increases by more than the 30% with respect to that of previously developed software techniques.