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

HOW DO RADIOLOGISTS USE THE HUMAN SEARCH ENGINE?

Jeremy M Wolfe  1 , Karla K Evans  2 , Trafton Drew  3 , Avigael Aizenman  4 , Emilie Josephs  5
Affiliations
Review

HOW DO RADIOLOGISTS USE THE HUMAN SEARCH ENGINE?

Jeremy M Wolfe et al. Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2016 Jun.

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?

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Syntactic and semantic guidance help to find likely locations for people in real-world scenes like this.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Illustration of bottom-up and top-down guidance. One item ‘pops out’ because of its bottom-up salience. Gray, round ‘nodules’ can be found by guiding attention in a top-down manner to gray and round items.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
An unusual piece of a lung CT.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Effect of target prevalence on error rates in non-expert observers (top panel) and in radiologists performing a screening mammography task (bottom panel). Data replotted from Wolfe et al.(57) and Evans et al.(58).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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