The dramatic rise of digital medical imaging has allowed medical personnel to see inside their patients as never before. Many software products are now available to view this data in various 2D and 3D formats. This also raises many basic research questions on spatial perception for humans viewing these images. The work presented here attempts to answer the question: How would adding the stereopsis depth cue affect relative position tasks in a medical context? By designing and conducting a study to isolate the benefits between monoscopic 3D and stereoscopic 3D displays in a relative position task, the following hypothesis was tested: stereoscopic 3D displays are beneficial over monoscopic 3D displays for relative position judgment tasks in a medical visualization setting. The results show that stereoscopic condition yielded a higher score than the monoscopic condition, but the results were not always statistically significant.

Date Published: 28 March 2013
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8673, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment, 86730N (28 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2007087

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8673:
Medical Imaging 2013: Image Perception, Observer Performance, and Technology Assessment
Craig K. Abbey; Claudia R. Mello-Thoms, Editor(s)