Challenges and approaches to interactive visualization in healthcare workspaces

Abstract

Introduction: Most medical specialties rely on 3D image data either for diagnosis, surgical planning, surgical navigation, education or patient-clinician communication. Surprisingly, conventional medical image workstations do not promote proper visual insight nor visual collaboration between professionals. Redesigning conventional applications into visually rich and interactive platforms that seamlessly bring together professionals, devices and 3D medical images, may foster better healthcare by promoting visual insights and boost visual memory through collaboration [1–3]. To this end, we envision portable, accessible, and easy to deploy interactive visualization settings to be commonly adopted in clinical environments. This entails adopting novel technologies (e.g., interactive surfaces, augmented reality and virtual reality) into different healthcare workspaces. Consequently, designing novel medical user interfaces and medical user experiences can offer more natural ways to interact with and engage in collaborative tasks around 3D images.

Challenges and approaches: Moving from conventional workstations to interactive visualization platforms brings about new and interesting challenges. By interacting with healthcare professionals, visiting their workspaces, analyzing their requirements and suggesting new ways to interact with 3D medical images, we have identified the major hurdles. For one (i) it is difficult to create and nurture a network of healthcare professionals interested on taking time off their office hours or after-hours to engage in research on a regular basis; (ii) a linguistic barrier between healthcare professionals and computer scientists, as clinicians and health technicians usually provide “big picture scenarios” lacking details crucial to interface design, requiring extra effort to develop a working set of specifications; (iii) many clinicians overlook the technical complexity hidden from the view of users, believing in easy-to-deploy “automagical” solutions; and (iv) identifying current healthcare practices that could be improved by adopting interactive technologies. In order for healthcare professionals to realize that interactive visualization systems may bring added value over traditional practices, it is necessary to develop both well-designed and easy-to-learn medical user interfaces that promote more natural user experiences. In addition, these interactive visualization systems must also be cost-effective, accessible, portable, novel, yet familiar to enable professionals to collaboratively work either in loco or remotely. While developing such approaches is never an easy task [4], the potential rewards make it a very worthwhile endeavor.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through projects UID/CEC/50021/2013 and IT-MEDEX PTDC/EEI-SII/6038/2014. The last author thanks the financial support given by FCT for the postdoctoral grant SFRH/BPD/97449/2013.