Forgery Blind Inspection for Detecting Manipulations of Gel Electrophoresis Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces FBI$_{GEL}$, a fast and efficient method for detecting manipulations in molecular biology images like Western blots and PCR, addressing a gap in forgery detection for such specialized images.

Contribution

The paper presents FBI$_{GEL}$, a novel blind inquiry method tailored for molecular experiment images, capable of revealing local modifications efficiently.

Findings

Successfully identified manipulations in questioned papers.

Demonstrated computational efficiency suitable for large-scale analysis.

Confirmed presence of unnatural patterns in public questioned 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 FBI$_{GEL}$, 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, FBI$_{GEL}$ 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, FBI$_{GEL}$ is computationally efficient and thus suitable for large scale inquiry tasks for WB/PCR image integrity. We applied FBI$_{GEL}$ on several papers questioned by the public on \textbf{PUBPEER}, and our results show that figures of those papers indeed contain doubtful unnatural patterns.