Using dominant points and variants for profile extraction from chromosomes

摘要

The most accurate methods for automatic analysis of chromosomes under a light microscope today extract numerical features from band-pattern profiles along their longitudinal axes. The construction of a reliable axis is a crucial step in this process. We propose a new way based on the dominant points of the contour and cubic splines. The dominant points serve as candidates for the tips of the chromosome. Ambiguities are dissolved by the recently developed method of variants for object identification. A Voronoi diagram decomposes the chromosome in slices for profile extraction. The method improves the currently best classification results significantly yielding a test-set error rate of 0.61%.