2024-02-02 08:30:05
Lab life. The Dana-Farber Institute, in Boston, one of the main American centers of cancer research, affiliated with Harvard University, is facing a major crisis putting its reputation and credibility at stake: it has just requested retraction of six scientific articles, signed by some of its leading members, and corrections for dozens of others. These measures come after a British biologist, Sholto David, described on the site of German fraud hunter Leonid Schneider suspicious image manipulations in 58 studies from Dana-Farber.
Could this have happened if the journals which have published the disputed articles for around twenty years had had artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to detect these image manipulations in advance?
In his first editorial of the year 2024, Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the American magazine Science and associated journals, announces, in any case, having adopted this innovation: the manuscripts submitted to these publications will now be passed through the filter of such software, called Proofig. “This should help detect both simple errors and fraudulent activity before deciding to publish”, explains Holden Thorp. A necessity, due to recent « incidents » which have eroded public trust in scientists and damaged the careers of some of them, “who had not detected doctored images coming from their own laboratories”.
Read the investigation: AI-generated images and the risk of rewriting history
Already adopted by other scientific publishers, Proofig has proven its ability to detect “problematic figures”, says Holden Thorp. He recalls that, for seven years now, Science uses another software, iThenticate, to detect plagiarism. If AI is used to detect image alterations, humans retain control over the analysis and final decision. Science will also use Proofig to retrospectively analyze articles whose integrity could be questioned.
Example of fraudulent duplication of a part of a microscopy image, detected by the Proofig software. PROOFIG
Dror Kolodkin-Gal is the creator of Proofig, an Israeli start-up which has more than twenty employees. This former researcher was struck, during his career, by the fact that the reputation of the best scientists could be tarnished “by stupid image duplication errors”unintentional. “It was incomprehensible to me that there were no quality control tools for work that sometimes requires years of effort and millions of dollars of investment. » He finally decided to create it.
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