Radiology

Visual Perception
 

Principal Investigator:
Philip Judy, PhD

Co-Investigators:
Arthur E Burgess, PhD
Francine L Jacobson, MD

The Perception Laboratory is an alliance of investigators from the Department of Radiology. These investigators collaborate in projects that seek a better understanding of the physical and perceptual factors that underlie the creation, presentation, and interpretation of radiological images. These projects measure the human observer's ability to perform specific detection tasks using real or simulated radiological images. The Perception Laboratory's goal is to develop analytical models and direct calculations that predict and realize the performance of an optimal observer in various prototypic clinical tasks. Using psychophysical experiments, the laboratory projects investigate how closely human observers track the performance of these explicit models. The Perception Laboratory investigations have developed and evaluated psychophysical methods that measure the observer performance on tasks that are more complex than the signal- known-exactly (SKE) detection paradigm commonly used in ROC experiments.

Kijewski MF, Swensson RG, Judy PF. Analysis of Rating Data from Multiple-Alternative Tasks. Journal of Mathematical Psychology 1989; 33: 428-451.

Swensson RG. Unified measurement of observer performance in detecting and localizing target objects on images. Med Phys. 1996; 23:1 709-25.

The Perception Laboratory is supporting the Radiology Departments lung cancer screening using CT program. The projects are evaluating the human precision and accuracy of lung nodule sizes and presentation schemes of volume CT data using cine image presentation of multiple images.

The laboratory has developed Video Monitor Test Pattern Tutorials to help you assess your monitor's performance in displaying gray-scale images, such as those shown on BrighamRAD, to their best potential. You may wish to use these tools before viewing the BrighamRAD teaching cases or other clinical images on your monitor.

Perception Laboratory
Division of Physics and Engineering
Department of Radiology
Brigham and Women's Hospital
75 Francis Street
Boston, MA 02115


Additional Data Available:
Visit the Visual Perception Laboratory area for additional data related to the article "Influence of CT Image Size and Format on Accuracy of Lung Nodule Detection" by SE Seltzer, PF Judy, U Feldman, L Scarff, and FL Jacobson. The article appears in the March 1998 issue of Radiology. (Radiology 1998;206:617-622.)
 

For further information contact:
Philip F Judy, PhD at pjudy@partners.org