Sensory Perception & Interaction, Research Group

Advances in image acquisition technology mean that radiologists today must examine thousands of images to make a diagnosis. However, the physical interactions performed to view these images are repetitive and not specialized to the task. Additionally, automatic and/or radiologist-generated annotations may impact how radiologists scroll through image stacks as they review areas of interest. We analyzed manual aspects of this work by observing and/or interviewing 19 radiologists; stack scrolling dominated the resulting task examples. We used a simplified stack seeded with correct or incorrect annotations in our experiment on lay users. The experiment investigated the impact of four scrolling techniques: traditional scrollwheel, click+drag, sliding-touch and tilting to access rate control. We also examined the effect of visual vs. haptic annotation cues’ on scrolling dynamics, detection accuracy and subjective factors. Scrollwheel was the fastest scrolling technique overall for our lay participants. Combined visual and haptic annotation highlights increased the speed of target-finding in comparison to either modality alone. Multimodal annotations may be useful in radiology image interpretation; users are heavily visually loaded, and there is background noise in the hospital environment. From interviews with radiologists, we see that they are receptive to a mouse that they can use to map different movements to interactions with images as an alternative to the standard mouse usually provided with their workstation.