Segmentation of microarray images by mathematical morphology

DNA chips (i.e., microarrays) biotechnology is a hybridization (i.e., matching of pairs of DNA)-based process that makes possible to quantify the relative abundance of mRNA of two distinct samples by analyzing their fluorescence signals. This technique requires robotic placement (i.e., spotting) of thousands of cDNAs (i.e., complementary DNA) in an array format on glass microscope slides. The spotted cDNAs are the hybridization targets for the mRNA samples. The two different samples of mRNA, usually labeled with Cy3 and Cy5 fluorochromes, are cohybridized onto each spotted gene. After hybridization, one digital image is acquired for each fluorochrome wavelength. Then, it is necessary to recognize each gene by its position in the array and to estimate its signal (i.e., hybridization information). For that, it is necessary to segment the image in three classes of objects: subarrays (i.e., set of grouped spots), spot box (i.e., the rectangular neighborhood that contains a spot) and spot (i.e., region of the image where there exists signal). In this paper, we present a technique based on mathematical morphology that performs this segmentation. In the website http://www.vision.ime.usp.br/demos/ microarray/detailed experimental results are presented. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.