Automatic analysis of agarose gel images
Motivation: Automatic tools to speed up routine biological processes are very much sought after in bio-medical research. Much repetitive work in molecular biology, such as allele calling in genetic analysis, can be made semi-automatic or task specific automatic by using existing techniques from comp...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Conference item |
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2001
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| Summary: | Motivation: Automatic tools to speed up routine biological processes are very much sought after in bio-medical research. Much repetitive work in molecular biology, such as allele calling in genetic analysis, can be made semi-automatic or task specific automatic by using existing techniques from computer science and signal processing. Computerized analysis is reproducible and avoids various forms of human error. Semi-automatic techniques with an interactive check on the results speed up the analysis and reduce the error. Results: We have successfully implemented an image processing software package to automatically analyze agarose gel images of polymorphic DNA markers. We have obtained up to 90% accuracy for the classification of alleles in good quality images and up to 70% accuracy in average quality images. These results are obtained within a few seconds. Even after subsequent interactive checking to increase the accuracy of allele classification to 100%, the overall speed with which the data can be processed is greatly increased, compared to manual allele classification. |
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