User Interface Design for a Radiological Imaging Workstation

Abstract

The diagnostic workstation serves as the radiologist's interface to the PACS and is intended to ultimately supersede the film alternator as the radiologist's principal tool for image reviewing, reporting, and consulting. At the University of Washington, we have developed a personal computer-based, single-screen, radiological imaging workstation and two supporting user interfaces. The first interface, RadUI I, used pictorial directories to offer the user a quick visual overview of a single patient study. In addition, it made available a variety of image processing functions through a mouse-based, menu-driven user interface. A second user interface was motivated by our belief that the display of images, rather than image processing, is the fundamental issue in workstation design for radiological viewing. The RadUI II user interface supports the tiled display of up to 4 independent, virtual display monitors on a single physical screen. Both interfaces are based on a hybrid alternator-filmstrip conceptual model. This paper describes the two user interfaces and reports the results of an evaluation designed to study the effectiveness of the alternator-filmstrip model.