Effective Denoising of 2D Gel Proteomics Images using Contourlets

2D gel electrophoresis (2DGE) is the most commonly used method for protein separation. After gel scanning, images with a plethora of spot features are generated. In this paper we propose the use of the contourlet transform (CT) for 2D gels image denoising and compare it to the wavelet transform (WT). We show that contourlets not only achieve better average PSNR performance, but also preserve better, relatively to wavelets, the spot boundaries and alter less the intensities of significant spot features. Proper denoising of 2DGE images is essential in order to extract reliable spot features in proteomics workflows for biomarkers discovery.