The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	An algorithm for estimating the quality of microarrays
Author:	Sodhi, Ajeet S.
View Online:	njit-etd2002-039 (viii, 35 pages ~ 2.2 MB pdf)
Department:	Federated Biological Sciences Department of NJIT and Rutgers-Newark
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Computational Biology
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Recce, Michael (Committee chair) Hart, Ronald Philip (Committee member) Tolias, Peter P. (Committee member)
Date:	2002-08
Keywords:	Microarrays Microarray evaluation Molecular biology
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Microarray technology is currently one of the most valuable gene expression tools in molecular biology allowing the experimenter to simultaneously quantify the expression of thousands of genes. It is also one of the most difficult tools to use accurately as each microarray produces a large amount of information that needs to be inspected and normalized before analysis. As the size of a microarray or number of replicates increase, the use of manual inspection becomes impractical. The aim of this thesis is to introduce an algorithm that evaluates each feature of a microarray from the scanned data file. A quality score is calculated from various spot parameters, the quality-quotient, and can be used to automatically assess the quality of the spot. This quality-quotient can then be utilized to automatically select quality spots or act as a weighting factor for comparing spots from replicate microarrays.