A Database System for the Management and Karyotype Analysis of Chromosome Image Data

In many laboratories of biology which usually doing FISH and GISH experiments, it is important to store, retrieve, and manage large amount of chromosome image data easily. For this purpose, conservative way of data management, that is, each technician keeps their experimental data in their own PCs, will ruin for thousands or millions of image data. Furthermore, version management of image data is also needed in such laboratories since karyotype analysis means a series of image processing from raw image data taken by cooled CCD camera to final image data in which all the chromosomes are cropped, directed vertically, and sorted in the order of their size. To assist such a chromosome image data management, we are developing a database system for storing, retrieval, and karyotype analysis of them (Fig. 1).