‘Do you see what I see?’ Medical imaging: the interpretation of visual information

Abstract

Röntgen's discovery of x-rays in 1895, gave to medicine the extraordinary benefit of being able to see inside the living body without surgery. Over time, technology has added to the sophistication of imaging processes in medicine and we now have a wide range of techniques at our disposal for the investigation and early detection of disease. But radiology deals with visual information; and like any information this requires interpretation. It is a practical field and medical images are used to make inferences about the state of peoples' health. These inferences are subject to the same variability and error as any decision-making process and so the criteria for the success of medical imaging are based not entirely on the images themselves but on the performance of the decision-makers. Research in the accuracy of medical imaging must draw on techniques from a wide range of disciplines including physics, psychology, computing, neuroscience and medicine in attempting to better understand the processes involved in visual decision-making in this context and to minimise diagnostic error