Geometric alignment of 2D gel electrophoresis images using physics-based elastic registration

A key technique for protein analysis is the geometric alignment of 2D gel electrophoresis (2-DE) images. We introduce a new hybrid elastic registration approach for 2-DE images, which is based on an analytic solution of the Navier equation. With this approach cross-effects in elastic deformations can be handled, which is important for the registration of 2-DE images. We have successfully applied our approach to register 2-DE gel images of different levels of complexity and have performed a quantitative evaluation of the results. We have also carried out a comparison with a previous hybrid elastic registration scheme.