Structural matching of 2D electrophoresis gels using deformed graphs

2D electrophoresis is a well known method for protein separation which is extremely useful in the field of proteomics. Each spot in the image represents a protein accumulation and the goal is to perform a differential analysis between pairs of images to study changes in protein content. It is thus necessary to register two images by finding spot correspondences. Although it may seem a simple task, generally, the manual processing of this kind of images is very cumbersome, especially when strong variations between corresponding sets of spots are expected (e.g. strong non-linear deformations and outliers). In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a new quadratic assignment formulation together with a correspondence estimation algorithm based on graph matching which takes into account the structural information between the detected spots. Each image is represented by a graph and the task is to find a maximum common subgraph. Successful experimental results using real data a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: PRL
• Authors: Alexandre Noma, Alvaro Pardo, Roberto Marcondes Cesar Junior
• Keywords: Comparative Performance Evaluation, Estimation Algorithm, Ground Truth Data, Pattern Recognition, PRL 2011