Figure 6

Microarray data storage formats and relative compression ratios. The numbering of the formats corresponds to that in Figure 1. Individual probe data is impossible to measure with current scanning technologies, but this is likely to change with technological advances. As the space savings gained using more complex compression become greater, the coding effort and computational expense to extract specific data points out of the files become greater. Retrieving a small set of intensity values from BioPNG is much faster because only those selected pixel values need to be converted.