Using the maximum between-class variance for automatic gridding of cDNA microarray images.

Gridding is the first and most important step to separate the spots into distinct areas in microarray image analysis. Human intervention is necessary for most gridding methods, even if some so-called fully automatic approaches also need preset parameters. The applicability of these methods is limited in certain domains and will cause variations in the gene expression results. In addition, improper gridding, which is influenced by both the misalignment and high noise level, will affect the high throughput analysis. In this paper, we have presented a fully automatic gridding technique to break through the limitation of traditional mathematical morphology gridding methods. First, a preprocessing algorithm was applied for noise reduction. Subsequently, the optimal threshold was gained by using the improved Otsu method to actually locate each spot. In order to diminish the error, the original gridding result was optimized according to the heuristic techniques by estimating the distribution of the spots. Intensive experiments on six different data sets indicate that our method is superior to the traditional morphology one and is robust in the presence of noise. More importantly, the algorithm involved in our method is simple. Furthermore, human intervention and parameters presetting are unnecessary when the algorithm is applied in different types of microarray images.

Improving the computational efficiency of recursive cluster elimination for gene selection.

The gene expression data are usually provided with a large number of genes and a relatively small number of samples, which brings a lot of new challenges. Selecting those informative genes becomes the main issue in microarray data analysis. Recursive cluster elimination based on support vector machine (SVM-RCE) has shown the better classification accuracy on some microarray data sets than recursive feature elimination based on support vector machine (SVM-RFE). However, SVM-RCE is extremely time-consuming. In this paper, we propose an improved method of SVM-RCE called ISVM-RCE. ISVM-RCE first trains a SVM model with all clusters, then applies the infinite norm of weight coefficient vector in each cluster to score the cluster, finally eliminates the gene clusters with the lowest score. In addition, ISVM-RCE eliminates genes within the clusters instead of removing a cluster of genes when the number of clusters is small. We have tested ISVM-RCE on six gene expression data sets and compared their performances with SVM-RCE and linear-discriminant-analysis-based RFE (LDA-RFE). The experiment results on these data sets show that ISVM-RCE greatly reduces the time cost of SVM-RCE, meanwhile obtains comparable classification performance as SVM-RCE, while LDA-RFE is not stable.

Integrated application of uniform design and least-squares support vector machines to transfection optimization.

BACKGROUND: Transfection in mammalian cells based on liposome presents great challenge for biological professionals. To protect themselves from exogenous insults, mammalian cells tend to manifest poor transfection efficiency. In order to gain high efficiency, we have to optimize several conditions of transfection, such as amount of liposome, amount of plasmid, and cell density at transfection. However, this process may be time-consuming and energy-consuming. Fortunately, several mathematical methods, developed in the past decades, may facilitate the resolution of this issue. This study investigates the possibility of optimizing transfection efficiency by using a method referred to as least-squares support vector machine, which requires only a few experiments and maintains fairly high accuracy. RESULTS: A protocol consists of 15 experiments was performed according to the principle of uniform design. In this protocol, amount of liposome, amount of plasmid, and the number of seeded cells 24 h before transfection were set as independent variables and transfection efficiency was set as dependent variable. A model was deduced from independent variables and their respective dependent variable. Another protocol made up by 10 experiments was performed to test the accuracy of the model. The model manifested a high accuracy. Compared to traditional method, the integrated application of uniform design and least-squares support vector machine greatly reduced the number of required experiments. What's more, higher transfection efficiency was achieved. CONCLUSION: The integrated application of uniform design and least-squares support vector machine is a simple technique for obtaining high transfection efficiency. Using this novel method, the number of required experiments would be greatly cut down while higher efficiency would be gained. Least-squares support vector machine may be applicable to many other problems that need to be optimized.