APPLICATIONS OF CONTOURS AND PIXEL VALUE SUMMATION IN DETERMINING THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIGNAL INTENSITIES

Contours are two-dimensional plots of three-dimensional data. Contour lines and contour maps are useful mathematical tools for topographic mapping, geology, architecture, weather forecasting and several biological applications. In this paper their application has been extended to determining protein densities from biological samples. The proteins resolved using Western blot technique were subjected to contour-based band boundary determination combined with pixel-value based band density estimation. Additionally, the accuracy of this method has been evalu-ated by comparing it with the traditional densitometric analysis methods that use rolling disk algorithm that is used for estimating band density and background noise subtraction. It is demonstrated that the contour and pixel value technique is a versatile method for determining signals intensities from biological specimen.