ENHANCING RECOGNITION OF LESIONS IN RADIOGRAPHIC IMAGES USING PERCEPTUAL FEEDBACK

When radiologists search a medical x-ray image for an abnormality, the ir eyes often fixate and refixate the true target, dwelling on it for prolonged times, often without recognizing that they have discovered t he object of search. Monitoring the eye position of the radiologist pr ovides the x and y coordinates of the dwelling location. This location can be superimposed on the image and dynamically fed back to the radi ologist for reevaluation. When this is done, the probability of recogn izing and reporting an abnormality is shown to be enhanced significant ly. An increase of 20% in observer performance is observed for radiolo gists searching chest images for tumors after receiving perceptual fee dback compared to a second look without perceptual feedback. The true- positive rate increased and the false-positive rate decreased. Percept ual feedback represents a potentially significant technique for enhanc ing lesion recognition in radiology. (C) 1998 society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [S0091-3286(98)00203-7].