HOW DO RADIOLOGISTS USE THE HUMAN SEARCH ENGINE?

Jeremy M Wolfe; Karla K Evans; Trafton Drew; Avigael Aizenman; Emilie Josephs

doi:10.1093/rpd/ncv501

HOW DO RADIOLOGISTS USE THE HUMAN SEARCH ENGINE?

Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2016 Jun;169(1-4):24-31. doi: 10.1093/rpd/ncv501. Epub 2015 Dec 8.

Authors

Jeremy M Wolfe¹, Karla K Evans², Trafton Drew³, Avigael Aizenman⁴, Emilie Josephs⁵

Affiliations

¹ Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Cambridge, MA, USA Departments of Radiology and Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA jwolfe@partners.org.
² Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.
³ Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
⁴ Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁵ Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Abstract

Radiologists perform many 'visual search tasks' in which they look for one or more instances of one or more types of target item in a medical image (e.g. cancer screening). To understand and improve how radiologists do such tasks, it must be understood how the human 'search engine' works. This article briefly reviews some of the relevant work into this aspect of medical image perception. Questions include how attention and the eyes are guided in radiologic search? How is global (image-wide) information used in search? How might properties of human vision and human cognition lead to errors in radiologic search?

Publication types

Review

MeSH terms

Data Mining / methods*
Diagnostic Imaging / methods*
Evidence-Based Medicine
Humans
Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology*
Radiologists
Radiology / methods*
Search Engine*
Task Performance and Analysis
Visual Perception / physiology*