Streamlining Digital Archives With Eye Tracking
Digital archiving is an idea that’s slowly creeping into the workplace and it’s only a matter of time before more professionals, offices, and consumers start making it a part of their daily lives. It’s involved in our daily multi-tasking on the PC to some extent, and depending on your job, you may already be using it. When it comes to the medical industry, it’s really an invaluable idea.
Digital archives of biomedical imagery could certainly put the necessary critical information at doctors’ fingertips, giving them the ability to call up a file within seconds and improving their daily medical practice. At the moment, however, current databases outweigh much of the technological speed, and with the explosion of medical imaging in recent years, it makes for a lot of information to sort through, bogging down current archiving systems.
Enter Rochester Institute of Technology professor Anne Haake, who recently won grants addressing this problem from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Haake has proposed an image database built on the input from intended end-users and designed from the beginning with flexible user interfaces. Her team is planning to develop a prototype using input from dermatologists to refine the search mechanism for images of various skin conditions.
In a recent article at Medical News Today’s website, Haake says that it’s necessary to involve users from the very beginning. “This is especially true in the biomedicinal area where there is so much domain knowledge that it will be specific to each particular specialty,” she says.
Professor Haake began her career as a developmental biologist and went on to study computing and biomedical informatics. With the biomedical archiving project, she’s managed to combine two strengths inspired by research she did while on sabbatical from the NIH National Library of Medicine.
With her funding, Haake plans to venture further into visual perception research with the aid of eye tracking, designing a content-based image retrieval system that can be accessed through touch, gaze, voice, and gesture. The NIH portion of the funding will be used to fuse image understanding and medical knowledge. Haake plans to streamline the search process, making for more efficient queries and engineering better algorithms – ones that don’t trip on nuances, failing to distinguish between disparate objects, such as a whale and a ship, as the original article reads.
Database With Physician Input And Novel Eye-Tracking Techniques
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