DNA Microarray Image Intensity Extraction using Eigenspots

DNA microarrays are commonly used in the rapid analysis of gene expression in organisms. Image analysis is used to measure the average intensity of circular image areas (spots), which correspond to the level of expression of the genes. A crucial aspect of image analysis is the estimation of the background noise. Currently, background subtraction algorithms are used to estimate the local background noise and subtract it from the signal. In this paper we use principal component analysis (PCA) to de-correlate the signal from the noise, by projecting each spot on the space of eigenvectors, which we term eigenspots. PCA is well suited for such application due to the structural nature of the images. To compare the proposed method with other background estimation methods we use the industry standard signal-to-noise metric xdev.