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Chinese Brain-Imaging Device a Suspected Copy of U.S. Device

A Chinese team's brain imaging device has come underquestion from developers of a U.S. device who say it's a near duplicate oftheirs, LiveScience has learned. An article on the Chinese device was publishedin the prestigious journal Science, and the U.S. researchers are preparing aformal letter to the journal in response.

According to the report appearing in the Nov. 4 onlineedition of Science, the Chinese imaging device used a diamond knife to shaveribbons off a centimeter-size mouse brain and imaged the slices during theprocess. That allowed the Chinese team to create a 3-D map of the brain that revealeddetails as small as the axonsand dendrites - the circuitry that transmits signals between brain cells -as a step in the race to map the connections in the brain.

LiveScience contacted Yoonsuck Choe, director of the BrainNetworks Laboratory at Texas A&M University, for comment on the Chinese devicethe day the paper was published, and the inquiry by the website immediately setoff alarms.

Choe's lab, which had developed its own knife-edge scanningmicroscope, or KESM, said today (Nov. 15) it will not officially comment indetail because it is preparing an official "Letter of Science"submission to formally alert the editors of the journal.

The U.S. researchers have already contacted the journal withtheir concerns, and a Science representative told LiveScience that the matteris being taken seriously.

Choe said he suspects the Chinese researchers copied the KESMdesign to create their own version of the brain imaging device. Due to LiveScience'searly involvement in the controversy, the website has been able to reconstructsome background on how the U.S. brain imaging device could have been copied.

How it went down

Choe's lab started the development of its KESM almost adecade ago. The main architect behind the instrument was Bruce McCormick(1928-2007), a computer scientist at Texas A&M University.

The Chinese group in question hails from the Britton ChanceCenter for Biomedical Photonics at Wuhan National Laboratory forOptoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in China.

Choe possessesan e-mail that shows the same Chinese lab previously asking the mainengineering contractor for Choe's lab, Micro Star Technologies, for acustom-made diamond knife. The knife forms a key part of the KESM, along withcommercially available components such as the camera.

Micro Star Technologies refused the Chinese request.

Now made in China

Despite Micro Star's refusal, Choe said he believes theChinese team may have gotten enough information about KESM from detailed onlinetechnical reports and a Journal of Microscopy article to manufacture a nearlyexact replica.

The Chinese researchers, led by Qingming Luo, named their device the Micro-Optical SectioningTomography, or MOST. They did not respond to an e-mail request for an interviewfrom LiveScience at the time they announced the device.

Initial e-mail requests for comment by the Chinese team werenot returned.

Choe said technical specs and details for MOST make thedevice an almost perfect replica of KESM. The Chinese researchers gave only passingmention to the U.S. team in the Science article.

Suspicions first arose when LiveScience contacted SebastianSeung, a computational neuroscientist at MIT. He leads a collaborative effortto speed up the mapping of the brain'swiring diagrams, known as connectomes.

"I just looked at it briefly, but it doesn't seemnovel," Seung said in an e-mail on the morning of Nov. 4. "Isn't itequivalent to this?"

"This" referred to the KESM developed by Choe's lab.Seung then suggested contacting Choe.

A tale of two labs

Choe and his colleagues e-mailed their concerns to Science onthe night of Nov. 4, along with the technical information and publicationreferences to support those concerns.

The journal confirmed to LiveScience that it had receivedthe concerns of Choe's lab and that the Science editorial department would takethem seriously.

"It's so preliminary right now and we don't have thefacts - we weren't involved with [what] happened between theseresearchers," said Kathleen Wren, Science press package director, in aphone interviewNov. 5. "Certainlyour editorial department will evaluate this, and the next step is to make surethey have all the relevant facts."

The Science editors eventually responded on Nov. 12 bytelling Choe's Texas A&M group that it could either contact the Chineseresearchers directly or write a formal "Letter of Science" forpublication in the journal. The U.S. researchers are currently preparing theirofficial letter to the journal.

"Science is a self-correcting enterprise, and thepublication of letters to the editor, technical comments, and other responsesto original research, including other research papers, are a routine part ofthe scientific process," Wren said in an e-mail to LiveScience.

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