Automated DNA sizing in atomic force microscope images

An automated algorithm is presented to determine fragment DNA size from Atomic Force Microscope images. Several real and synthetic images were tested for different image and fragment sizes and different background noises. The automated approach allows to minimize processing time with respect to manual DNA sizing and to extract information that can be used to perform further analysis on the molecules. For computer-generated test images the percentage error in length estimation is less than 1% and its average value is 0.4%. For real images the deviation with respect to manually-performed length estimation is around 1%.