Automatic 2-D gel registration using distance minimisation of image morphing

The necessity of applying image processing techniques to gel electrophoresis images is starting to appear. In particular, registering two gels for comparison purposes has emerged from the increasing popularity of gel databases distributed across the Internet. Current registration techniques are however cumbersome in the sense that they require user intervention for placing landmarks on both gels in order to define a mapping function. Current techniques also cannot account for distortions which are common to 2-D gels and non-reproducible by nature. Thus, the only method of choice is to make a side-by-side comparison of the gels. We propose an automatic registration method especially designed with electrophoresis gels in mind to give an optimal registration while still allowing human input. We think that an automated registration of 2-D gels, because of its non-intrusive nature, will lead to a wider acceptance of image vision technology in electrophoresis gel software. Potentially, other types of biomedical images could benefit from the technique