Visual search from lab to clinic and back

摘要

Many of the tasks of medical image perception can be understood as demanding visual search tasks (especially if you happen to be a visual search researcher). Basic research on visual search can tell us quite a lot about how medical image search tasks proceed because even experts have to use the human "search engine" with all its limitations. Humans can only deploy attention to one or a very few items at any one time. Human search is "guided" search. Humans deploy their attention to likely target objects on the basis of the basic visual features of object and on the basis of an understanding of the scene containing those objects. This guidance operates in medical images as well as in the mundane scenes of everyday life. The paper reviews some of the dialogue between medical image perception by experts and visual search as studied in the laboratory.