Ethics in Scientific Imaging: Highlights of a Lecture

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

Recently a colleague gave a lecture on ethics in scientific imaging. The lecture was for graduate students, but faculty members could attend. Because imaging is often crucial to research communication, I attended the lecture.

The speaker, Dr. Robert Burghardt, directs a large, well-established imaging laboratory. He also is an associate dean for research and graduate studies. Thus, dealing with images and ensuring that research is ethically done are important parts of his work.

Dr. Burghardt emphasized that the job of a researcher is to test a hypothesis, not to prove a hypothesis. Thus, for example, researchers must obtain enough images to yield valid conclusions. Researchers should not just seek images that confirm their hypotheses.

In the lecture, Dr. Burghardt discussed mainly digital imaging. Because digital images are easy to alter, questions may readily arise about how to handle them ethically. Among Dr. Burghardt’s points:

• Save the original of your image. Make any modifications on a copy.

• If you adjust the brightness, contrast, or color of an image, make sure that doing so does not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent any information.

• Do not enhance, obscure, move, remove, or introduce any specific feature in an image.

• When submitting images to journals, use file formats such as TIFF, which retain all information. Do not use JPEG format, which discards some information.

• Know that journals sometimes use software to check whether images have been inappropriately altered.

Information sources that Dr. Burghardt cited included a paper on working ethically with digital images. If you work with digital images, perhaps look at this paper.

Until the next post—

Barbara