Unveiling Vestiges of Man-Made Modifications on Molecular-Biological Experiment Images

Abstract

Recently, falsified images have been found in papers involved in research misconducts. However, although there have been many image forgery detection methods, none of them was designed for molecular-biological experiment images. In this paper, we proposed a fast blind inquiry method, named FBIGEL, for integrity of images obtained from two common sorts of molecular experiments, i.e., western blot (WB) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Based on an optimized pseudo-background capable of highlighting local residues, FBIGEL can reveal traceable vestiges suggesting inappropriate local modifications on WB/PCR images. Additionally, because the optimized pseudo-background is derived according to a closed-form solution, FBIGEL is computationally efficient and thus suitable for large scale inquiry tasks for WB/PCR image integrity. We applied FBIGEL on several papers questioned by the public on PUBPEER, and our results show that figures of those papers indeed contain doubtful unnatural patterns.