One of the key limitations for proteomic studies using 2-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) is the lack of rapid, robust and reproducible methods for detecting, matching and quantifying protein spots. The most commonly used approaches involve first detecting spots and drawing spot boundaries on individual gels, then matching spots across gels and finally quantifying each spot by calculating normalized spot volumes. This approach is time consuming, error-prone and frequently requires extensive manual editing, which can unintentionally introduce bias into the results.