A Handy Image Explorer with Tactile Feedback for Diagnostic Imaging

Diagnostic imaging with tracing a series of CT scan images is an important way for doctors to detect lesions. The doctors, however, need to view a huge number of high resolution images in a day, therefore, excessive burdens on their vision become a very serious problem. We propose a new method of assisting the diagnostic imaging with a multimodal interaction technique. We designed and prototyped a system allowing users (doctors) to stably exploring and finding critical features observed in the medical images even if they get eye strain. The system supports sound and hap tic modalities for assisting the users´ vision to find important parts that cannot be overlooked in the images. It extracts some visual features observed in the images and transforms them to other sensory parameters. Then, the system notifies the doctors for possible existence of lesions in the images with multiple sensory outputs. This paper especially presents a method to use hap tic modality, the sense of touch, as a sensory channel for calling the users´ attention to focus on some specific parts in an image. We also show mobile tablet personal computers (PCs) are promising hardware platform to implement the system.