Forgery Blind Inspection for Detecting Manipulations of Gel Electrophoresis 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.