Active contours based segmentation of 2DGE proteomics images

The detection of protein spots in 2DGE images is one of the most important tasks in a proteomics data analysis workflow. All subsequent steps of differential expression analysis for biomarkers discovery depend on its effectiveness. In this study, we introduce the use of Active Contours without Edges coupled with Contourlet Transform - based image enhancement for extracting accurately the gel image foreground (regions with spots) from the background. We demonstrate, using both synthetic and real gel images, that the proposed approach extracts tight spot regions which do not include background areas but include almost all spots detected by PDQuest a popular commercial 2DGE image analysis package. Furthermore, our method does not require manual calibration for every new image in order to detect weak but often important “faint” spots. The method can be used as a first segmentation stage and/or to validate results of other spot detection algorithms.