  In this two-part paper, we present a novel framework and methodology to
analyze data from certain image-based biochemical assays, e.g., ELISPOT and
Fluorospot assays. In this first part, we start by presenting a physical
partial differential equations (PDE) model up to image acquisition for these
biochemical assays. Then, we use the PDEs' Green function to derive a novel
parametrization of the acquired images. This parametrization allows us to
propose a functional optimization problem to address inverse diffusion. In
particular, we propose a non-negative group-sparsity regularized optimization
problem with the goal of localizing and characterizing the biological cells
involved in the said assays. We continue by proposing a suitable discretization
scheme that enables both the generation of synthetic data and implementable
algorithms to address inverse diffusion. We end Part I by providing a
preliminary comparison between the results of our methodology and an expert
human labeler on real data. Part II is devoted to providing an accelerated
proximal gradient algorithm to solve the proposed problem and to the empirical
validation of our methodology.
