Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analysis

Abstract

Images document scientific discoveries and are prevalent in modern biomedical research. Microscopy imaging in particular is currently undergoing rapid technological advancements. However for scientists wishing to publish the obtained images and image analyses results, there are to date no unified guidelines. Consequently, microscopy images and image data in publications may be unclear or difficult to interpret. Here we present community-developed checklists for preparing light microscopy images and image analysis for publications. These checklists offer authors, readers, and publishers key recommendations for image formatting and annotation, color selection, data availability, and for reporting image analysis workflows. The goal of our guidelines is to increase the clarity and reproducibility of image figures and thereby heighten the quality of microscopy data is in publications.

Made to measure: An introduction to quantifying microscopy data in the life sciences

“…Measuring image properties such as SNR and resolution and recording them alongside other metadata from image acquisition helps to add additional context to results from quantitative analysis. 80 It is also important to recognise and reduce bias in quantitative image analysis. One major avenue for this is investing time in creating automated analysis pipelines whereby batches of images acquired under different biological conditions can be analysed in the same manner, free from any user input.…”