Improving Mouse Pointing for Radiology Tasks

Radiologists make their main analysis and diagnosis based on careful observation of medical images, although there are all kinds of automatic methods under development. Radiologists typically use a scroll mouse to click on an image when they find something interesting, and they also use the mouse to navigate through the image slices in volumetric scans. Thus they perform many thousands of mouse clicks every day, causing wrist fatigue. This paper presents a method of improving the mouse pointing performance by reducing the time taken to move the mouse to a target. We use a dynamic Control-to-Display ratio of the mouse, by adjusting the ratio according to the current distance to the target. In theory this reduces the difficulty of the target selection, and also reduces the movement time. The result of a preliminary study demonstrates that the speed of pointing can be improved under certain conditions, particularly for small targets and for long distances to move. In addition, all participants claim that this mouse speed change reduces the difficulty of selecting a small target.