A curvature-based multiresolution automatic karyotyping system

This paper presents a method to segment, characterise and pair a set of chromosomes in a cell of an eukaryotic organism. This method yields several new features: (i) chromosomes are captured at non-uniform resolution to minimise the problem instance; (ii) segmentation is adaptively conducted by means of a hierarchical structure in a fast way; (iii) the curvature of each chromosome is studied at high resolution by means of attentive steps; (iv) a very short and uncorrelated feature vector is extracted from curvature by analysing its spectral components; and (v) a multistage benchmark classifier is used to pair chromosomes according to shape and banding. The method has been tested with publicly available databases. Results were successfully compared to manual karyotypes. Received: 26 June 2000 / Accepted: 4 December 2001 Published online: 3 June 2003 Correspondence to: Cristina Urdiales García (e-mail: cris@dte.uma.es, Tel.: +34-952-132757, Fax: +34-952-131447)