Crafting diversity in radiology image stack scrolling: control and annotations

To make a single diagnosis, today's radiologists must examine thousands of images; yet little effort has been put into refining this time-consuming, repetitive task. Meanwhile, automatic or radiologist-generated annotations may impact how radiologists navigate image stacks as they review lesions of interest. Observation and/or interviews of 19 radiologists revealed that stack scrolling dominated the resulting task examples. We iteratively crafted and obtained radiologist feedback for a variety of prototypes, then evaluated their scrolling and annotation-review support for lay users. With a simplified stack seeded with correct / incorrect annotations, we compared the effect of four scrolling techniques (traditional scrollwheel and click-and-drag, plus sliding-touch, and tilt rate control) and visual vs. haptic annotation cues on scrolling dynamics, detection accuracy and subjective factors. Scrollwheel was fastest overall, and combined visual / haptic annotation cues sped target-finding relative to either modality alone. We share insights on integrating our findings into radiologist practice.