Quantitative analysis of microarray images

The goal of quantitative analysis of microarrays is to determine the strength of the hybridization for every element of the array (spot). Since new technology allows the detection of the signal at single molecule level, new methods for analysis are necessary. A detection error of 10% is considered acceptable. In this paper we discuss three approaches to single peak detection inside the spots of the arrays, and compare the results we obtain on simulated and real images. These approaches are: global thresholding, an adaptive filter combined with local thresholding. We proposed a third algorithm, a statistical estimation of the background combined with clustering, which produces comparable results to well known algorithms, without having to perform the manual adjustment of the parameters.