Medical Imaging

Radiologists must make life-critical diagnostic decisions from noisy medical images that have complex visual structure and statistics.
Radiologists must make life-critical diagnostic decisions from noisy medical images that have complex visual structure and statistics.

There are times when an experienced physician sees a visible lesion clearly and times when he does not. This is the baffling problem, apparently partly visual and partly psychologic. They constitute the still unexplained human equation in diagnostic procedures.

Henry Garland, M.D., 1959

 

 

In the last ten years, our basic knowledge of physics of radiological images has increased to such an extent that it cries out to be linked with observer performance studies.

Kurt Rossmann, 1974

 

 

Our research aims at understanding the processes by which radiologists and doctors detect and classify disease from images, and how they use this acquired knowledge to improve the acquisition, processing, and display of medical images to improve the sensitivity and specificity of their diagnostic decisions. The projects range from basic scientific studies, where we try to understand the mechanisms, strategies, and algorithms used by radiologists and doctors to detect and/or classify disease, to the development of metrics of medical image quality and computer algorithms for applying the knowledge we gain of how humans process medical images to assist radiologists and doctors in real-world medical scenarios.

 

 

Affiliated Researchers

Researcher
Psychological & Brain Sciences
Medical Imaging and Physics, Mathematics.
Graduate Student Researcher
Psychological & Brain Sciences
Psychology, Cognition, Perception, Cognitive Neuroscience