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Preface |
1 Applied Vision Research Centre, University of Loughborough, Loughborough, UK, 2 Department of Radiology Research University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, 3 School of Medical Imaging Sciences, St Martin's College, Lancaster, UK
Correspondence: Professor David J Manning, School of Medical Imaging Sciences, St Martin's College, Lancaster, UK. E-mail: DJManning{at}ucsm.ac.uk
In the autumn of 2005, the Medical Image Perception Conference XI represented the successful continuation of a meeting that began in 1985. Originally the meeting was called the Far West Image Perception Conference since it was first held in Utah. A variety of sites then hosted the conference over the years, but the name Far West was retained – mostly for sentimental reasons. However, in 1998 the Medical Image Perception Society (MIPS) was formed to further organize members of the image perception community and MIPS became the official sponsor of the meeting. Therefore, the name was changed in 2001 to the MIPS Conference. MIPS XI was held in Windermere, UK, on 27–30 September 2005, at the Low Wood Hotel and Conference Centre. This represents the first international venue for MIPS and we were quite successful in attracting a much broader international audience than in past years.
There were 38 25-minute talks and 4 posters given at the conference in 6 basic sessions, themed as follows:
The meeting was a huge success with papers being presented in a variety of areas including visual search, methodology, vision modelling techniques, computer-aided detection and diagnosis, medical display issues, and cognitive and perceptual factors in reading medical images. The meeting began with a special session addressing the Society for Computer Applications in Radiology Transforming the Radiological Interpretation Process (SCAR TRIP) initiative (http://www.scarnet.net/trip/). The visual search and cognition and perception sections were the most interesting at the meeting, with a number of talks reporting on the use of eye-position recording to discover the ways that clinicians interact with medical images. Many of the talks were on radiology, but this year there were also new image areas represented such as pathology and surgery.
The methodology session is a mainstay of the conference and, as usual, it highlighted receiver operating characteristic (ROC) techniques. All of the talks dealt with various aspects of the multi-reader multi-case ROC approach – a "proper" ROC method that is widely used in this area. Although most of the talks dealt with theoretical aspects of developing the underlying models further, there were also a couple of more practical talks dealing with actual data analysis methods and current software developments. In practical radiology it has been well documented that, for example, approximately 30% of early lung cancer is missed on chest radiographs when the evidence is clearly visible in retrospect. Any new investigative methods, perceptual aids or image presentation techniques that have claims to improve such error rates must be tested with rigorous and reliable methodologies, and the MIPS conference has become the focus for lively debates on the efficacy of the various approaches.
The computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) session is a relatively new addition to the MIPS Conference, since it is only in the past 5 years or so that CAD has moved out of the development stages and into the arena of practical use by radiologists. We still, however, need research into why CAD works to improve observer performance; are there better ways to present the CAD prompts and are there other image inputs that we can use than those simply visible to the human observer? Mammography is still the major focus of CAD research, but a few talks on chest imaging and CT were also presented this year. This is consistent with the trend that has seen CAD become one of the major generalized research subjects in radiology.
In the sessions on visual search, studies using techniques for tracking reader eye-movements and reports on workload throughput in reporting sessions made timely reference to the ergonomics of radiology. This aspect of the practice of medical imaging is of increasing interest at a time when significant changes are taking place in the volume of images per examination and in their presentation format.
Perceptual issues in radiology are becoming more important in an age where image data sets face radiologists with unprecedented workloads, image presentation changes occur with regular frequency, and practitioners have to adapt to new working methods involving machine intelligence and second reading. The Medical Image Perception Society's biannual conference takes a singular interest in the interaction of observer and visual decision task and continues to be a source of multi-disciplinary support to medical imaging. The papers contained here represent the ways in which this community of researchers brings together the techniques and methods of many disciplines with the aim of improving practical radiology.
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