Quality Assurance Methods for Processing Microarray Imagery.

Peter Bajcsy, Zonglin L. Liu and Lei Liu

Proceedings of the 10^th Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (poster), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 3-7 August 2002.

We present a set of novel quality assurance (QA) control methods for processing DNA microarray laser scanned imagery. These methods have been designed to detect systematic errors in microarray images and remove any unreliable information from further data analysis. The QA methods are applied once grid cells with dots have been identifi ed. Each grid cell is screened for errors due to location and size, small signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), shape irregularity (topology) of a dot, and inconsistent intensity probability distributions. The goal of screening is to eliminate grid cells with spotting or hybridization errors before features are extracted and any data mining is applied.