1265: An Approach for Spot Matching in 2-D Electrophoresis Gels

2-D electrophoresis is the study of expressions of proteins. The technique produces images that contain protein spots, One of the tasks in the analysis of these images is matching of protein spots in two corresponding images for differential expression study. In this paper, we propose an algorithm which integrates a hierarchical based and energy based methods. The hierarchical based method initially finds corresponding pairs of spots. We formulate a new matching energy, which consists of local spot structure similarity, image similarity, and a spatial constraint. The proposed energy is minimized to find corresponding pairs of spots by a greedy based optimization algorithm. We extensively tested our method with synthetic images and real 2-D gel images from different biological experiments.