Comparison between Digital Image Processing and Spectrophotometric Measurements Methods. Application in Electrophoresis Interpretation

Abstract

Background: Spectrophotometer is a very common instrument in various scientific fields and givesaccurate information about light absorbance and transmittance through materials usingmonochromatic light source. Though, devices used in spectrophotometry can be quite expensive,using components with high technical specifications and the procedure itself is time consuming. Regular digital image acquisition instruments like scanners and cameras on the other hand uses verycheap electronic components to record the information on 3 wide band channels (Red, Green,Blue). Purpose: This paper studies the possibility of correlating the measurements from thespectrophotometer with raw data from digital image acquisition instruments. Materials and Methods:Because the results will be used in protein electrophoresis, we prepared o set of plates with bloodserum in different dilutions, stained with Coomassie Brilliant Blue. The absorbance of the resultingplates has been measured using a spectrophotometer and after that, the plates were scanned with aregular office scanner. The digital image was converted in different color spaces (gray scale, RGB,HSV, HSL, CIEXYZ and CIELAB) using custom developed software in C++. We statisticallymeasured the correlation coefficient of different parameters from the color space with theabsorption measured with the spectrophotometer. Results and Discussion: The findings of this workshow that a consumer digital scanner can be used as a fast and inexpensive alternative tospectrophotometers. This offers the possibility of using scanned images of protein electrophoresisto make quantitative estimations regarding the proteinogram.