System and method for automatically processing microarrays

A method of evaluating a signal characterizing output of a process of assessing chemical materials manifested as an irregular array of signals, the array being a grid of sub-grids of the chemical materials, said method comprising the steps of:

• a. generating digital data characterizing a performance aspect of the process;
• and
• b. determining from the digital data a level of confidence in the signal characterizing output of the process.

A computer readable medium having stored therein one or more sequences of instructions for evaluating a signal characterizing output of a process of assessing chemical materials manifested as an irregular array of signals, the array being a grid of sub-grids of the chemical materials, said one or more sequences of instructions causing one or more processors to perform a plurality of acts, said acts comprising:

• a. generating digital data characterizing a performance aspect of the process;
• and
• b. determining from the digital data a level of confidence in the signal characterizing output of the process.

A system for assessing chemical material samples arranged as a grid, the system comprising:

• a memory for storing a digital image of the grid, where the digital image derived from a signal received from the chemical material samples, and is comprised of pixels;
• and
• a processor for accessing the digital image from said memory, identifying characteristics of the grid from the image, detecting a pixel representing the center of a signal received from a chemical material sample and an approximate radius of the signal received from the chemical material sample, segmenting the signal, and calculating a characterizing measure for the segmented signal.