Skip to main content

Medical Image Perception

This thematic series, published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, focuses on the field of medical image perception, broadly defined.

Imagery is ubiquitous in medicine, from screening mammograms to the displays on equipment monitoring patient status. The use of these images raises issues of both practical and basic interest. Sometimes these can be studies with medical professionals as the subject population. In other cases, the fundamental issues are studied using non-expert populations with an eye toward eventual testing with experts. 

Edited by: 

  • Jeremy Wolfe (Editor-in-Chief), Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA
  • Todd Horowitz, NIH, National Cancer Institute, USA 

This collection of articles has not been sponsored and articles have undergone the journal’s standard peer-review process. The Guest Editors declare no competing interests.

  1. Inspecting digital imaging for primary diagnosis introduces perceptual and cognitive demands for physicians tasked with interpreting visual medical information and arriving at appropriate diagnoses and treatme...

    Authors: Tad T. Brunyé, Trafton Drew, Donald L. Weaver and Joann G. Elmore
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2019 4:7
  2. Many medical professions require practitioners to perform visual categorizations in domains such as radiology, dermatology, and neurology. However, acquiring visual expertise is tedious and time-consuming and ...

    Authors: Brett D. Roads, Buyun Xu, June K. Robinson and James W. Tanaka
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:38
  3. A hallmark of a perceptual expert is the ability to detect and categorize stimuli in their domain of expertise after brief exposure. For example, expert radiologists can differentiate between “abnormal” and “n...

    Authors: Michael D. Chin, Karla K. Evans, Jeremy M. Wolfe, Jonathan Bowen and James W. Tanaka
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:31
  4. Training individuals to make accurate decisions from medical images is a critical component of education in diagnostic pathology. We describe a joint experimental and computational modeling approach to examine...

    Authors: Jennifer S. Trueblood, William R. Holmes, Adam C. Seegmiller, Jonathan Douds, Margaret Compton, Eszter Szentirmai, Megan Woodruff, Wenrui Huang, Charles Stratton and Quentin Eichbaum
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:28
  5. Radiological techniques for breast cancer detection are undergoing a massive technological shift—moving from mammography, a process that takes a two-dimensional (2D) image of breast tissue, to tomosynthesis, a...

    Authors: Stephen H. Adamo, Justin M. Ericson, Joseph C. Nah, Rachel Brem and Stephen R. Mitroff
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:17
  6. Brain tumour detection and diagnosis requires clinicians to inspect and analyse brain magnetic resonance images. Eye-tracking is commonly used to examine observers’ gaze behaviour during such medical image int...

    Authors: Emily M. Crowe, Iain D. Gilchrist and Christopher Kent
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:12
  7. Humans can extract considerable information from scenes, even when these are presented extremely quickly. The ability of an experienced radiologist to rapidly detect an abnormality on a mammogram may build upo...

    Authors: Ann J. Carrigan, Susan G. Wardle and Anina N. Rich
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:10
  8. We examined how visual sensitivity and perception are affected by adaptation to the characteristic amplitude spectra of X-ray mammography images. Because of the transmissive nature of X-ray photons, these imag...

    Authors: Elysse Kompaniez-Dunigan, Craig K. Abbey, John M. Boone and Michael A. Webster
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2018 3:3
  9. Radiologists make many important decisions when detecting nodules on chest radiographs. While training can result in high levels of performance of this task, there could be individual differences in relevant p...

    Authors: Mackenzie A. Sunday, Edwin Donnelly and Isabel Gauthier
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2017 2:36
  10. In a real world search, it can be important to keep ‘an eye out’ for items of interest that are not the primary subject of the search. For instance, you might look for the exit sign on the freeway, but you sho...

    Authors: Jeremy M. Wolfe, Abla Alaoui Soce and Hayden M. Schill
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2017 2:35
  11. This paper describes a novel method for displaying data obtained by three-dimensional medical imaging, by which the position and orientation of a freely movable screen are optically tracked and used in real ti...

    Authors: Gaurav Shukla, Roberta L. Klatzky, Bing Wu, Bo Wang, John Galeotti, Brian Chapmann and George Stetten
    Citation: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2017 2:34