A two-stage active contour-based scheme for spot detection in proteomics images

This work introduces a two-stage active contour-based scheme for the detection of protein spots in two-dimensional gel electrophoresis images. The proposed scheme is formulated as an expansion of the Chan-Vese model and is capable of distinguishing overlapping spots. Moreover, it remains unaffected in the presence of noise and the inhomogeneous background that characterize these images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme obtains more plausible spot boundaries than PDQuest (BioRad).