An Improved Automatic Detection of True Comets for DNA Damage Analysis

Comet assay is a well known method for evaluating DNA damage in individual cells. Silver stained comet assay images are employed in this study as they are widely used in clinical applications. When compared with fluorescent images silver stained images require additional pre-processing stages to effectively identify the region of interest. An improved method for effective automatic identification of true comets from the noisy silver stained images is proposed in this paper. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the recent related methods and shows better results in terms of %TP, %FN, %FP, Positive Predictive Value and sensitivity.