Approaches based on non-separable filter banks in 2D Gel electrophoresis image analysis

Analysis and interpretation of 2D gel images is a very important task in proteonomics study. The nonlinearties in the gel formation and image acquisition process leads to distortions, overlapped protein spots, saturated spots, faint spots, nonlinear intensity and uneven background in the gel images. As a result, pre-processing steps are important before image-analysis. De-noising is one of the most important preprocessing steps, and the overall accuracy of protein spot detection and analysis depends crucially on how effectively the 2D gel images have been de-noised. Non-separable processing methods, due to their inherent ability to be able to better represent directional information, seem to be promising for the processing of 2D gel images. In this paper, we explore approaches based on quincunx non-separable filter-banks for image de-noising, and show the overall effect on the protein spot detection accuracy.