Opportunity to Conduct Medical Image Perception Research (July 13-17 in Vienna)

OPPORTUNITY TO CONDUCT MEDICAL IMAGE PERCEPTION RESEARCH
July 13-17, 2022 at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna
It is happening, in person.

Investigators conducting research on medical image perception know that it can be difficult to attract radiologists or other experts to participate as experimental observers. From 2016 to 2019, with support from the NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI), we ran the Perception Lab at the RSNA annual meeting in Chicago, a shared facility allowing multiple investigators to collect data on interested professional observers. After a COVID-enforced break, we are happy to announce that this year’s version of a Medical Image Perception Lab is planned for: July 13 to 17 at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) in Vienna, Austria.

Unfortunately, COVID made it hard to plan and we have just confirmed that the Perception Lab will be happening. If you are interested, please send us an application as soon as you can. We will review these and get back to you on a rolling basis.

Facilities: There will be several small, darkened testing areas. At ECR, we expect that each will be equipped with a desk, two chairs, two monitors, power, and internet access. We may be able to get the loan of some medical-grade monitors. In addition, there will be tables in an open area with power and wireless internet. Many labs have found that they can test observers in these more casual environs. ECR will provide some help in recruiting observers and with general publicity. In addition, registration fees for the meeting will be waived for 2-3 participating researchers per lab. Individual researchers will need to provide any equipment other than the monitors described above (e.g., if you need medical grade monitors, computers, eye-trackers, you need to make arrangements). You will also need to provide personnel to carry out the experiment. Finally, investigators will be asked to contribute a modest amount to a fund that will allow us to run a participant lottery (an Amazon gift card did well last year).

Application

To apply for time and space:

1) Provide contact with information for the PI and for any researcher(s) who you plan to send to the meeting. Include their position (postdoc, research assistant, etc.) office address, cell phone contact, and email.

2) Please provide 1-2 pages of prose (exclusive of figures and references) including:

a) An abstract briefly describing the project.

b) A significance statement describing why this is worth doing.

c) Brief Background and Methods.

d) A statement of your requirements:

i) IMPORTANT: Do you need to test in one of the darkened testing rooms or can you test out in the open. We will allocate testing room time in two-hour slots from 9-5 each day of the meeting.

ii) How many participants do you hope to test?

iii) How much time do you need with each participant? Keep in mind that your observers will probably be willing to give you no more than 20-30 mins of time for an experiment.

iv) What are the desired qualifications for your observers (e.g., level of experience)?

v) What equipment do you need (and/or will you bring)?

If your project is accepted, we will need:

1) A brief paragraph explaining what the participants can expect to be doing in the study (e.g., reading N chest x-rays) and the potential benefit to the participants. What might they learn?

2) A statement about how you plan to reward participants if applicable (e.g., lottery for an iPad, box of chocolate).

3) Proof of IRB approval from your institution.

4) The recruitment methods that have worked best have been very “retail”. You will do best if you are willing to approach people and ask them if they are interested in participating. In addition, we will supply vivid, identifying t-shirts. They help too – assuming you wear them.

5) After the meeting, we will need a report about how many observers you tested, what you found, and your thoughts about the process.

Review Committee

Decisions about the allocation of time and space will be made by our review committee.

Questions can be directed to Jeremy Wolfe (jwolfe@bwh.harvard.edu) and Todd Horowitz (todd.horowitz@nih.gov).