title: Temporal Characteristics of Radiologists' and Novices' Lesion Detection in Viewing Medical Images Presented Rapidly and Sequentially.
abstract: Although viewing multiple stacks of medical images presented on a display is a relatively new but useful medical task, little is known about this task. Particularly, it is unclear how radiologists search for lesions in this type of image reading. When viewing cluttered and dynamic displays, continuous motion itself does not capture attention. Thus, it is effective for the target detection that observers' attention is captured by the onset signal of a suddenly appearing target among the continuously moving distractors (i.e., a passive viewing strategy). This can be applied to stack viewing tasks, because lesions often show up as transient signals in medical images which are sequentially presented simulating a dynamic and smoothly transforming image progression of organs. However, it is unclear whether observers can detect a target when the target appears at the beginning of a sequential presentation where the global apparent motion onset signal (i.e., signal of the initiation of the apparent motion by sequential presentation) occurs. We investigated the ability of radiologists to detect lesions during such tasks by comparing the performances of radiologists and novices. Results show that overall performance of radiologists is better than novices. Furthermore, the temporal locations of lesions in CT image sequences, i.e.,whena lesion appears in an image sequence, does not affect the performance of radiologists, whereas it does affect the performance of novices. Results indicate that novices have greater difficulty in detecting a lesion appearing early than late in the image sequence. We suggest that radiologists have other mechanisms to detect lesions in medical images with little attention which novices do not have. This ability is critically important when viewing rapid sequential presentations of multiple CT images, such as stack viewing tasks.
authors: Department of Psychology, The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan.
authors: Ryoichi
authors: R
authors: Nakashima
authors: Department of Psychology, The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan.
authors: Yuya
authors: Y
authors: Komori
authors: The University of Tokyo Hospital Tokyo, Japan.
authors: Eriko
authors: E
authors: Maeda
authors: The University of Tokyo Hospital Tokyo, Japan.
authors: Takeharu
authors: T
authors: Yoshikawa
authors: Department of Psychology, The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan.
authors: Kazuhiko
authors: K
authors: Yokosawa
keywords: lesion detection; medical screening; radiologist; rapid serial visual presentation; stack viewing; visual search in dynamic display