Two Dimensional Gel Electrophoresis Image Inpainting for Improving Protein Spot Detection

Many specialized software programs are available for processing two dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) images. However, the anomalies existing in these images make the achievement of a reliable system for 2-DGE image analysis still difficult to reach. In this paper, we propose a new preprocessing technique applied to 2-DGE images. The new technique is based on image inpainting using Mumford Shah Euler Lagrange to discard anomalies such as vertical and horizontal streaking from these images. We also present a comparison of the analysis of 2-DGE images inpainted by the proposed technique and non-inpainted images using the known commercial software Delta2D. We compute the F-measure in both cases for three different 2-DGE images. The degree of improvement in F-measure reaches 18.5% in first image and 5.9% in second image and 3.8% in third image. Our new 2D Gel image preprocessing method based on Mumford Shah inpainting shows a significant improvement when comparing analysis of inpainted images with non-inpainted images.