Mass Spectrometry Data Processing Using Zero-crossing Lines in Multi-scale of Gaussian Derivative Wavelet

Motivation: Peaks are the key information in mass spectrometry (MS) which has been increasingly used to discover diseases-related proteomic patterns. Peak detection is an essential step for MS-based proteomic data analysis. Recently, several peak detection algorithms have been proposed. However, in these algorithms, there are three major deficiencies: (i) because the noise is often removed, the true signal could also be removed; (ii) baseline removal step may get rid of true peaks and create new false peaks; (iii) in peak quantification step, a threshold of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is usually used to remove false peaks; however, noise estimations in SNR calculation are often inaccurate in either time or wavelet domain. In this article, we propose new algorithms to solve these problems. First, we use bivariate shrinkage estimator in stationary wavelet domain to avoid removing true peaks in denoising step. Second, without baseline removal, zero-crossing lines in multi-scale of derivative Gaussian wavelets are investigated with mixture of Gaussian to estimate discriminative parameters of peaks. Third, in quantification step, the frequency, SD, height and rank of peaks are used to detect both high and small energy peaks with robustness to noise.

Results: We propose a novel Gaussian Derivative Wavelet (GDWavelet) method to more accurately detect true peaks with a lower false discovery rate than existing methods. The proposed GDWavelet method has been performed on the real Surface-Enhanced Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-Of-Flight (SELDI-TOF) spectrum with known polypeptide positions and on two synthetic data with Gaussian and real noise. All experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other commonly used methods. The standard receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves are used to evaluate the experimental results.

Availability: http://ranger.uta.edu/~heng/MS/GDWavelet.html or http://www.naaan.org/nhanguyen/archive.htm.