Automated Gridding of Microarrays

Abstract

Microarrays, with advancement in proteomics, have proven to be a disruptive technology in the world of pharmacology as they enable researchers carry out multiple assays on a single chip in a convenient and time efficient manner. Accompanied by image processing algorithms, they yield veritable results rapidly. The intensity of the microarray spots is highly dependent on the hybridization prospects between its probe and the analyte introduced. Hence, most techniques given in the literature based solely on the intensity fail to identify the spots correctly. Moreover, thousands of spots need to be manually aligned before further analysis. This work presents a novel technique to automatically identify the blocks, despite having artefacts, accurately.

Keywords: Microarrays, Thresholding, Correlation