Individual differences in perceptual abilities in medical imaging: the Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test

Mackenzie A Sunday,Isabel Gauthier,Edwin Donnelly

doi:10.1186/s41235-017-0073-4

Mackenzie A Sunday, Isabel Gauthier + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0073-4

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Abstract

Radiologists make many important decisions when detecting nodules on chest radiographs. While training can result in high levels of performance of this task, there could be individual differences in relevant perceptual abilities that are present pre-training. A pre-requisite to address this question is a valid and reliable measure of such abilities. The present work introduces a new measure, the Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test (VCRT), which aims to quantify individual differences in perceptual abilities for radiograph-related decision-making in novices. We validate the relevance of the test to diagnostic imaging by verifying radiologists’ superior performance on the test compared to novices’. The final VCRT version produces scores with acceptable internal consistency. Then, we investigate how the VCRT can be used in future research by evaluating how the test relates to extant measures of face and object recognition ability. We find that the VCRT shares a small but significant portion of its variance with a measure of novel object recognition, suggesting that some aspect of VCRT performance is driven by a domain-general visual ability.

Highlights

In the United States, becoming a thoracic radiologist usually requires 4 years of medical school, 1 year of internship, 4 years of residency and one additional year of a thoracic radiology fellowship
With this goal in mind, we find that our test shares a small amount of variance with a novel object recognition measure, tentatively suggesting that a small but significant amount of variation in Vanderbilt Chest Radiograph Test (VCRT) performance may be accounted for by a domain-general recognition ability
Though we might attribute this shared variance to the fact that chest radiographs can be considered novel to the novice subjects, we find that the small sample of experts show above-average Novel Object Memory Test (NOMT) performance

Summary

Introduction

In the United States, becoming a thoracic radiologist usually requires 4 years of medical school, 1 year of internship, 4 years of residency and one additional year of a thoracic radiology fellowship. Variability in radiologists’ performances may occur for several reasons, including differences in decision-making (Donovan & Litchfield, 2013) and perceptual abilities (Bass & Chiles, 1990). These abilities may be influenced by variability in training and experience or pre-existing individual differences in perceptual abilities. These influences of individual differences have remained unexplored, and even when radiological performance is explicitly measured, most studies do not focus on the psychometric properties of the task, including its reliability (Bass & Chiles, 1990; Harley et al, 2009). The general goal of our study is to develop a test capable of measuring such pre-existing individual differences to determine how these individual differences might relate to object recognition abilities

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