An Automated Method for Gridding in Microarray Images

Microarray technology is a powerful tool for analyzing the expression of a large number of genes in parallel. A typical microarray image consists of a few thousands of spots which determine the level of gene expression in the sample. In this paper we propose a method which automatically addresses each spot area in the image. Initially, a preliminary segmentation of the image is produced using a template matching algorithm. Next, grid and spot finding are realized. The position of non-expressed spots is located and finally a Voronoi diagram is employed to fit the grid on the image. Our method has been evaluated in a set of five images consisting of 45960 spots, from the Stanford microarray database and the reported accuracy for spot detection was 93%