Channelized Hotelling observers for signal detection in stack-mode reading of volumetric images on medical displays with slow response time

Volumetric medical images are commonly read in stack-browsing mode. However, previous studies suggest that slow temporal response of medical liquid crystal displays may degrade the diagnostic accuracy (lesion detectability) at browsing rates as low as 10 frames per second (fps). Recently, a multi-slice channelized Hotelling observer (msCHO) model was proposed to estimate the detection performance in 3D images. This implementation of the msCHO restricted the analysis to the luminance of a display pixel at the end of the frame time (end-of-frame luminance) while ignoring the luminance transition within the frame time (intra-frame luminance). Such an approach fails to differentiate between, for example, the commonly found case of two displays with different temporal profiles of luminance as long as their end-of-frame luminance levels are the same. In order to overcome this limitation of the msCHO, we propose a new upsampled msCHO (umsCHO) which acts on images obtained using both the intra-frame and the end-of-frame luminance information. The two models are compared on a set of synthesized 3D images for a range of browsing rates (16.67, 25 and 50 fps). Our results demonstrate that, depending on the details of the luminance transition profiles, neglecting the intra-frame luminance information may lead to over- or underestimation of lesion detectability. Therefore, we argue that using the umsCHO rather than msCHO model is more appropriate for estimating the detection performance in the stack-browsing mode.