Evaluating different radiology workstation interaction techniques with radiologists and laypersons

This paper presents a new methodology for evaluating radiology workstation interaction features, using lay subjects to perform a radiology look-alike task with artificial stimuli. We validated this methodology by evaluating two different workstation interaction techniques with two groups of subjects: laypersons and radiologists, using a set of artificial targets to simulate the reading of a diagnostic examination. Overall, the results from the two groups of subjects performing the same tasks were very similar. Both groups showed significantly faster response times using a new interaction technique, and the mouse clicks for both groups were very similar, showing that all the subjects mastered the style of interaction in a similar way. The errors made by both groups were comparable. These results show that it is possible to test new workstation interaction features using look-alike radiological tasks and inexperienced laypersons, and that the results do transfer to radiologists performing the same tasks.