The challenge in partial overlap images

Whether you are currently a senior editor, principal investigator, or a research student – you have probably experienced the endless hours of sitting behind the microscope, trying to capture the results of your latest experiment.

These captures will later become the published article’s figures – but could you tell if some of the captures were overlapping?

 

Microscopy images overlap usually happen as an honest mistake: working in different size scales, losing orientation and mixing up the microscope capture’s file names, can all lead to wrongly publishing two different microscopy subimages that partially overlap.

 

However, it can also be an unethical way of creating false results sometimes.

 

Nevertheless, as an editor or a PI, you would like to prevent it from being published and take the appropriate actions: for example, as a PI it might help you learn how it happened and explain to your lab team how to avoid future mistakes.

 

Detecting overlaps might be hard – even impossible sometimes. It requires the human eye to make multiplied comparisons, which most of us are not capable of doing.

 

Check yourself: were you able to detect the overlapping areas?

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Beneath the page, you can find the answers, provided by the automated Proofig analysis.