A Novel TechnIque for Identification of Partially Hidden Metaphase Chromosomes

Karyotyping is the process of identifying and arranging chromosomes in a proper order such that the resulting arrangement helps the geneticist in the identification of missing and structurally improper chromosomes, which in turn helps in arriving at genetic factors associated with diagnosis of diseases.Though there are lot of software packages available to perform automatic karyotyping, the accuracy of these are severely limited by the presence of occlusion. In the event of occlusion, manual intervention is required to finish the process of karyotyping which consumes more time. Taking into account this main limitation faced by the automatic karyotyping programs, a novel technique has been developed to identify chromosomes even in the presence of occlusion. The technique makes use of the evolutionary algorithm at a micro level by extracting a population from the image of occluded chromosomes and by doing the operations such as selection, crossover, mutation and reinsertion on the population. The hidden chromosomes are found out after certain number of generations. The number of generations before the result is arrived and the probability of detection depends on the amount of occlusion. The technique works well even if the occlusion is mutual, that is, when both objects occlude each other and even if 90% of the chromosome is hidden.