Abstract
This journal is dedicated to “use-inspired basic research” where a problem in the world shapes the hypotheses for a study in the laboratory. This brief review presents several examples of “use-inspired basic research” in the area of medical image perception. These are cases where the field of radiology raises an interesting issue in visual cognition. Basic research on those issues may then lead to proposals to improve performance on clinical tasks in medical image perception. Of the six examples given here, the first three ask essentially perceptual questions: How can stereopsis improve medical image perception? How shall we assess the tradeoff between radiation dose and image quality? How does the choice of colors change the interpretation of medical images? The second three examples address attentional issues in those aspects of radiology that can be described as visual search problems: Can eye tracking help us understand errors in radiologic search? What happens if the number of targets in an image is unknown? What happens if, as in radiology screening programs, the target of search is very rare?
Highlights
Medical images pose many interesting and important perceptual and cognitive questions
How do you know if this irregular mass has changed size or just shape in the time intervening between two images? Why are 20– 30 % of breast cancers missed in breast cancer screening (Hoff et al, 2012)? Why don’t computer-aided detection systems help as much as one might think they would (Nishikawa et al, 2012)? Though such questions are interesting, they are often quite hard to answer
When we tracked the eye movements of radiologists reading these novel stimuli, we found that they fell into two categories—at least when looking for signs of lung cancer in a chest computed tomography (CT) composed of between one and 300 slices
Summary
Medical images pose many interesting and important perceptual and cognitive questions. The field of medical image perception raises fundamental scientific questions that have not been asked in visual cognition. I will describe six examples of medical image perception research.
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