A compression algorithm for Two-Dimensional Electrophoresis images

In molecular biology, Two-Dimensional Electrophoresis technique is one of the most important and wildly used techniques, since the image results generated from this technique might provide the distribution and quantity of different types of protein. Using this information, biologists can study the characteristics of various known diseases, find unknown diseases, and, furthermore, develop the treatments of different diseases. To analyze the experimental data obtained from 2-DE, we need to process tremendous amount of images. To save the storage and communication cost, images of different experimental data need to be compressed, under the constraint that no important information can be lost. In this article, using the characteristics of images generated through 2-DE, we propose a novel compression technique for 2-DE images based on JPEG-LS. As the experimental results show, the proposed method outperforms several well-known lossless compression methods, such as JPEG-LS, JPEG(lossless), JPEG2000(lossless), WinRAR, and WinZIP.