An image informatics method for automated quantitative analysis of phenotype visual similarities

The post genomic era introduced the need to define single gene functions within biological pathways. A systems biology approach can be realized by automating image acquisition and phenotype classification. While machinery for automated data acquisition have been developing rapidly in the past years, the main bottleneck remains the effectiveness of the computer vision algorithms. Here we describe a fully automated process for finding phenotype similarities within a dataset acquired from an RNAi screen. The source code for the algorithms is available for free download.