An automatic Method to identify and extract information of DNA bands in Gel Electrophoresis images

This paper presents a system for the automatic processing of digital images obtained from gel electrophoresis. The system identifies automatically the number and the location of lanes in the digital image, as well as the location of bands on each lane, without any intervention from the user. A reference lane with a know substance is used to compute the molecular weight of the observed (unknown) bands. The system performance was tested using 12 images, obtained from 4 gels with 3 different exposures. A total of 5443 bands were tested in 12 images, 672 reference / observed lane pairs. The average error in the estimation of molecular weight of 9.2%.