Accurate segmentation of 2D-PAGE images

Segmentation is an essential and crucial process in 2D-PAGE image analysis. Although several software packages and techniques have been developed and are broadly utilized in biology laboratories, none of them can optimally segment 2D-PAGE images. This paper presents an effective approach for 2D-PAGE image segmentation. This approach extends our previous work by improving the segmentation accuracy. Experiments were conducted on a set of synthetic 16-bit 2D-PAGE images containing ~2000 spots of various intensities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to evaluate a spot segmentation method on 2D-PAGE images using a set of synthetic images that provide the challenges of real ones; inhomogeneous background, noise and artifacts, as well as faint, saturated and highly overlapping protein spots. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state of the art software packages and techniques since it: 1) generates more accurate boundaries and 2) separates overlapping spots correctly.