RADHunters: gamification in radiology perceptual education

Gamification is used in several fields as an adjunct to standard educational methods but has found limited application in radiology to date. Gamification may be useful for teaching radiology skills typically acquired through experience, such as perceptual skills. The goal of our study is to use a gamified radiology workstation to teach skills related to identification of pulmonary nodules and evaluate for changes in trainee performance.

We constructed a game called RADHunters to teach perceptual skills related to identification of pulmonary nodules on chest radiographs. Control and experimental groups were tasked with identifying nodules on chest radiographs on two sets of cases. The experimental group received gamified training for nodule identification using RADHunters between case sets, while the control group did not. Performance at nodule identification, localization, and confidence were compared. A poststudy survey was administered to assess for participants' thoughts about the gamified nodule detection training.

Survey responses were very positive with $$ -values for all survey responses $$ , indicating subjects felt this training was beneficial. Experimental and control groups had a statistically significant improvement in their ability to identify and localize nodules with $$ -values $$ . There was no significant difference between control and experimental groups. Neither group showed a statistically significant increase in their confidence in nodule localization.

Perceptual training using gamification may be a useful adjunct to conventional methods of radiology education.