A new watershed algorithm for protein spot detection in 2DGE images using the notion of fuzzy relations

An important issue in the analysis of two-dimensional electrophoresis images is the detection and quantification of protein spots. The main challenges in the segmentation of 2DGE images are to separate overlapping protein spots correctly and to find the abundance of weak protein spots. To enable comparison of protein patterns between different samples, it is necessary to match the patterns so that homologous spots are identified. In this paper we describe a new robust technique to segment and model the different spots present in the gels. The watershed segmentation algorithm is modified to handle the problem of over segmentation by initially partitioning the image to mosaic regions using the composition of fuzzy relations. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to overcome the over segmentation problem associated with the available algorithms.