Mixture Modeling of 2-D Gel Electrophoresis Spots Enhances the Performance of Spot Detection

2-D gel electrophoresis is the most commonly used method in biomedicine to separate even thousands of proteins in a complex sample on a single gel. Even though the technique is quite known, there is still a need to find an efficient and reliable method for detection of protein spots on gel image. In this paper, a three-step algorithm based on mixture of 2-D normal distribution functions is introduced to improve the efficiency of spot detection performed by the existing algorithms, namely Pinnacle software and watershed segmentation method. Comparison of methods is based on using simulated and real data sets with known true spot positions and different number of spots. Fitting a mixture of components to gel image allows for achieving higher sensitivity in detecting spots, regardless the method used to find initial conditions for the model parameters, and it leads to better overall performance of spot detection. By using mixture model, location of spot centers can be estimated with higher accuracy than using the Pinnacle method. An application of spot shape modeling gives higher sensitivity of obtaining low-intensity spots than the watershed method, which is crucial in the discovery of novel biomarkers.