A landmark extraction method for protein 2DE gel images based on multi-dimensional clustering

摘要

Objective:Two-dimensional electrophoresis (2DE) is a separation technique that can identify target proteins existing in a tissue. Its result is represented by a gel image that displays an individual protein in a tissue as a spot. However, because the technique suffers from low reproducibility, a user should manually annotate landmark spots on each gel image to analyze the spots of different images together. This operation is an error-prone and tedious job. For this reason, this paper proposes a method of extracting landmark spots automatically by using a data mining technique.