The online data repository Kaggle has removed a problematic dataset for violating intellectual property rights months after it was flagged. Researchers had used the images to train machine learning algorithms to detect stroke, but the dataset instead contained images of people with Bell’s palsy — as well as pictures of celebrities from movies and on the red carpet, as Retraction Watch reported in May, 2026. Adrian Barnett, a medical statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, flagged the dataset after discovering two others he and his colleagues investigated in a February preprint that showed signs of being fabricated.

Using a reverse image search, Barnett matched four of the photos in the dataset, called “Facial droop and facial paralysis image,” to a paper published years earlier in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA). Only after prompting the journal to complain to Kaggle did the company take down the dataset. The dataset page on Kaggle now shows a 404 error but no explanation for why it was removed.
 

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/29/kaggle-removes-problematic-stroke-dataset-for-copyright-infringement/

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