March 2003
Volume 16, Number 3
Adventures of an Experimental Psychologist in Medical Imaging
 Elizabeth Krupinski went to Cornell University as an undergraduate in psychology and received her PhD in experimental psychology from Temple University in 1992. She is a research professor at the University of Arizona in the departments of radiology and psychology. She is the director of evaluation and assessment for the Arizona Telemedicine Program and President of the Medical Image Perception Society. |
Sometimes you start out with one goal in mind and go down a completely different road. That's precisely what happened to my career path. After entering the psychology program at Cornell University as an undergraduate pre-med student with my eye on clinical psychology, I soon found myself moving in a different direction.
The neurobiology and behavior track fascinated me - inserting electrodes into the visual cortex of neonate hamsters to examine neuronal cell death. I found the higher-level perceptual and cognitive issues more intriguing than the biology or medical side of things. I continued with my master's degree in experimental psychology, concentrating on visual perception issues in art and aesthetics theory. While finishing the degree, my advisor told me about an associate of his, an educational psychologist in needed of a research assistant. While I had little practical research experience outside the classroom, but called for an interview. That interview with Calvin Nodine gave my career path a twist, leading me to my present position.
Nodine had just moved from Temple University to the Medical Image Perception Laboratory in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Radiology. He made the move to collaborate with Harold Kundel, a radiologist who had also recently made the move to Penn from Temple. It wasn't clear to me what psychology had to do with radiology, but I soon found out and have been involved in this area ever since.
I was hired at Penn and simultaneously pursued my PhD in experimental psychology at Temple, concentrating in visual perception. After graduation in 1992, I moved to the Department of Radiology at the University of Arizona to continue medical image perception research.
Radiology at its most basic level involves looking at an x-ray image - visual perception - and rendering a diagnostic decision - cognition. It sounds simple enough until you realize that although the basic anatomy is fairly consistent from person to person, there are wide variations in appearance of normal and abnormal anatomy, which the radiologist must process and interpret. Errors can occur at significant rates with significant impact on patient care and treatment. Understanding the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that underlay the interpretation of X-ray images is the goal of the type of psychology research I have been doing for nearly 15 years so that we can improve the diagnostic accuracy of radiologists and thereby improve patient care.
One of the main tools of my trade is eye-position recording to examine the ways in which radiologists search images and allocate attention in their search for features that would indicate the presence or absence of disease. Over the years I have investigated the perceptual causes of error, the use of perception-based feedback to improve performance, and the nature of expertise in radiology. Another important component to my study are human factors issues such as how should images and related information be displayed on a monitor to optimize search performance, and what types of physical properties of displays - luminance, tone, and scale - influence search and decision strategies.
Being in radiology has not, however, isolated me from the traditional psychology department or developing collaborative relationships with those in other fields. I have a joint appointment in the psychology department and have taught the Introductory Measurement & Statistics course for over 10 years. This not only keeps me in touch with those involved in basic perception research, but it has provided me with the opportunity to recruit psychology students to experience a more applied psychology research environment. Having an eye-position recording system gives me the opportunity to collaborate with others in the psychology department who want to use this tool to investigate topics of their own interest, such as reading or figure-ground discrimination. Aside from the physical separation between the main campus where the psychology department is located, and the medical school where radiology is located, I have experienced no barriers working in this rather non-traditional environment.
I would encourage those considering careers in psychology and even those already in psychology, to consider non-traditional environments where psychology in its many forms can play major roles. One of the greatest privileges of working in radiology as an experimental psychologist has been my role in improving the care and treatment of patients by understanding and improving the performance of radiologists in their interpretation of radiographic images.
