To a biologist, the protein spots and their locations on a 2-D gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) image are important information in protein studies. It is also very important that the 2DGE images can be transmitted and received quickly on the Internet. Currently, the progressive image transmission (PIT) method used for transmitting data on the Internet does not allow the important protein data on the 2-DGE image to be identified quickly after only a few transmissions. The content-based method proposed in the present paper applies the lossless bit-plane method (BPM) to important protein spots and the JPEG lossy compression to the unimportant non-protein background. Experimental results show that the protein spots can be quickly and completely identified after a few transmissions using BPM. Based on the partially transmitted image, the biologist can make a quick decision whether to accept or reject the sample. Once accepted, the remaining compressed background can be quickly transmitted using JPEG progressive transmission.
