Complementary DNA microarray experiments
are used to study human genome. However, microarray images
are corrupted by spatially inhomogeneous noise that
deteriorates image and consequently gene expression. An
adaptive microarray image restoration technique is developed
by suitably combining unsupervised clustering with the
restoration filters for boosting the performance of microarray
spots segmentation and for improving the accuracy of
subsequent gene expression. Microarray images comprised a
publicly available dataset of seven images, obtained from the
database of the MicroArray Genome Imaging & Clustering
Tool website. Each image contained 6400 spots investigating
the diauxic shift of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The adaptive
microarray image restoration technique combined 1/a griding
algorithm for locating individual cell images, 2/a clustering
algorithm, for assessing local noise from the spot’s background,
and 3/a wiener restoration filter, for enhancing individual
spots. The effect of the proposed technique quantified using a
well-known boundary detection algorithm (Gradient Vector
Flow snake) and the information theoretic metric of Jeffrey’s
divergence. The proposed technique increased the Jeffrey’s
metric from 0.0194 bits to 0.0314 bits, while boosted the
performance of the employed boundary detection algorithm.
Application of the proposed technique on cDNA microarray
images resulted in noise suppression and facilitated spot edge
detection.