Nuisance levels of noise effects radiologists' performance

McEntee, Mark F., Coffey, Amina, Ryan, John, O'Beirne, Aaron, Toomey, Rachel, Evanoff, Micheal, Manning, David J. and Brennan, Patrick (2010) Nuisance levels of noise effects radiologists' performance. In: Manning, David J. and Abbey, Craig K., (eds.) Medical Imaging 2010: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment. Proceedings of SPIE, 7627 . Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), Bellingham, UK. Full text not available from this repository.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.844193

Abstract

This study aimed to measure the sound levels in Irish x-ray departments. The study then established whether these levels of noise have an impact on radiologists performance Noise levels were recorded 10 times within each of 14 environments in 4 hospitals, 11 of which were locations where radiologic images are judged. Thirty chest images were then presented to 26 senior radiologists, who were asked to detect up to three nodular lesions within 30 posteroanterior chest x-ray images in the absence and presence of noise at amplitude demonstrated in the clinical environment. The results demonstrated that noise amplitudes rarely exceeded that encountered with normal conversation with the maximum mean value for an image-viewing environment being 56.1 dB. This level of noise had no impact on the ability of radiologists to identify chest lesions with figure of merits of 0.68, 0.69, and 0.68 with noise and 0.65, 0.68, and 0.67 without noise for chest radiologists, non-chest radiologists, and all radiologists, respectively. the difference in their performance using the DBM MRMC method was significantly better with noise than in the absence of noise at the 90% confidence interval (p=0.077). Further studies are required to establish whether other aspects of diagnosis are impaired such as recall and attention and the effects of more unexpected noise on performance.

Item Type: Book Section
Publisher: Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
ISBN: 9780819480286
Departments: Academic Departments > Medical & Sport Sciences (MSS) > Health and Medical Sciences
Depositing User: Insight Administrator
Date Deposited: 14 Oct 2011 13:37
Last Modified: 12 Jan 2024 09:01
URI: https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/405
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