Perception research in medical imaging

The function of medical imaging is to provide information and to reduce diagnostic uncertainty. Radiological information takes many forms including the spatial distributions of attenuation coefficients, acoustic impedances, proton densities, radiopharmaceutical concentrations and so on. The precision with which the information is presented also continues to be refined so the images produced now give outstanding reproduction of structures and functional location. All this gives a technical state of the art that could barely have been imagined a few decades ago. But radiology is highly practical. We use images to make inferences about the state of the health of patients and we judge the success of an imaging technique not just on the images themselves but on the radiologist’s performance and its effect on patient management [1]. So the success of medical imaging depends on a subjective notion of image quality that is often difficult to define an on factors that influence the ability of the observer to interpret the information.