State of the art: Eye-tracking studies in medical imaging

Eye-tracking – the process of measuring where people look in a visual field – has been widely used to study how humans process visual information. In medical imaging, eye-tracking has become a popular technique in many applications to reveal how visual search and recognition tasks are performed, providing information that can improve human performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of eye-tracking studies conducted with medical images and videos for diverse research purposes, including identification of degree of expertise, development of training, and understanding and modelling of visual search patterns. In addition, we present our recent eye-tracking study that involves a large number of screening mammograms viewed by experienced breast radiologists. Based on the eye-tracking data, we evaluate the plausibility of predicting visual attention by computational models

The impact of specialty settings on the perceived quality of medical ultrasound video

Health care professionals are increasingly viewing medical images and videos in a variety of environments. The perception of medical visual information across all specialties, career stages, and practice settings are critical to patient care and patient safety. Visual signal distortions, such as various types of noise and artifacts arising in medical imaging, affect the perceptual quality of visual content and potentially impact diagnoses. To optimize clinical practice, it is of fundamental importance to understand the way medical experts perceive visual quality. Psychophysical studies have been undertaken to evaluate the impact of visual distortions on the perceived quality of medical images and videos. However, very little research has been conducted on how speciality settings affect the perception of visual quality. In this paper, we investigate whether and how radiologists and sonographers differently perceive the quality of compressed ultrasound videos, via a dedicated subjective experiment. The findings can be used to develop useful solutions for improved visual experience and better image-based diagnoses

Deepening the Divide: Abortion Bans Further Harm Immigrant Communities

Immigrants, especially undocumented individuals and those in mixed-status families, are particularly vulnerable to the harmful impacts of abortion bans due to their unique barriers to care and increased risk of criminalization based on immigration status. Immigrants' barriers to abortion care include arbitrary Customs and Border Protection (CBP) checkpoints, a five-year waiting period for legal permanent residents to enroll in public health insurance programs, and agreements between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. Individuals in immigrant detention face additional threats to their reproductive health and overall well-being, including denial of abortion care and medically unnecessary gynecological procedures like forced hysterectomies. This factsheet highlights how the overturn of Roe v. Wade exacerbated pre-existing barriers to abortion care for immigrants. We propose a set of concrete recommendations for Congress and the Administration to support immigrant access to abortion

Study of video quality assessment for telesurgery

elemedicine provides a transformative practice for access to and delivery of timely and high quality healthcare in resource-poor settings. In a typical scenario of telesurgery, surgical tasks are performed with one surgeon situated at the patient’s side and one expert surgeon from a remote site. In order to make telesurgery practice realistic and secure, reliable transmission of medical videos over large distances is essential. However, telesurgery videos that are communicated remotely in real time are vulnerable to distortions in signals due to data compression and transmission. Depending on the system and its applications, visual content received by the surgeons differs in perceived quality, which may incur implications for the performance of telesurgery tasks. To rigorously study the assessment of the quality of telesurgery videos, we performed both qualitative and quantitative research, consisting of semi-structured interviews and video quality scoring with human subjects. Statistical analyses are conducted and results show that compression artifacts and transmission errors significantly affect the perceived quality; and the effects tend to depend on the specific surgical procedure, visual content, frame rate, and the degree of distortion. The findings of the study are readily applicable to improving telesurgery systems

A comparative study of mental health literacy in university students in Czechia and China

This study compares the mental health literacy (MHL) of university students in China and the Czech Republic. MHL refers to the ability to recognize mental health problems, adjust one’s mental state and seek professional assistance. The study recruited 358 Chinese university students (244 female and 114 male) and 282 Czech university students (247 female and 35 male) and collected data through online questionnaires using the O’Connor’s MHL Scale. The results indicated that Czech students had a significantly higher level of MHL compared with Chinese students based on the total score and other subscales. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of MHL on a global scale and the potential of cross-cultural comparisons to promote MHL and improve mental health outcomes. The disparity in MHL between the two countries highlights the need for increased mental health education and resources in China. Further research is needed to explore the cultural and educational factors contributing to the difference in MHL between China and the Czech Republic

Snap-induced morphing:From a single bistable shell to the origin of shape bifurcation in interacting shells

The bistability of embedded elements provides a natural route through which to introduce reprogrammability to elastic meta-materials. One example of this is the soft morphable sheet, in which bistable elements that can be snapped up or down, are embedded within a soft sheet. The state of the sheet can then be programmed by snapping particular elements up or down, resulting in different global shapes. However, attempts to leverage this programmability have been limited by the tendency for the deformations induced by multiple elastic elements to cause large global shape bifurcations. We study the root cause of this bifurcation in the soft morphable sheet by developing a detailed understanding of the behaviour of a single bistable element attached to a flat ‘skirt’ region. We study the geometrical limitations on the bistability of this single element, and show that the structure of its deformation can be understood using a boundary layer analysis. Moreover, by studying the compressive strains that a single bistable element induces in the surrounding skirt we show that the shape bifurcation in the soft morphable sheet can be delayed by an appropriate design of the lattice on which bistable elements are placed