What we can learn from deep space communication for reproducible bioimaging and data analysis

Multiple initiatives have attempted to define and recommend the annotation of images with metadata. However, proper documentation of complex and evolving projects is a difficult task, and the variety of storage methods-electronic labnotebooks, metadata servers, repositories and manuscripts-along with data from different time points of a given project leads to either redundancy in annotation or omissions. In this Commentary, we discuss how to tackle this problem, taking inspiration from space communication which uses error-correction protocols based on redundancy for data transmission. We provide a proof of concept using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) language model to digest redundant metadata entries of this manuscript and visualize the differences to complete metadata entries, highlight inconsistencies and correct human error to improve the documentation for more reproducibility and reusability.