This thesis studies relevance criteria for medical images' applied by health care professionals. The study also looks at the image information needs and image resources used by health care professionals, together with the image seeking behaviour of health care professionals from different disciplines. The work is a qualitative study that uses the Straussian version of grounded theory. The population of the study included health care professionals from different health and biomedical departments who worked in Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. In total twenty-nine health care professionals participated in this study and fifteen relevance criteria were identified from the data collected using semi-structured interviews and think-aloud protocols. The work forms part of the medical image retrieval track of ImageCLEF (ImageCLEFMed), and investigated the use of relevance criteria applied to search statements. Analysis indicates that some of the criteria identified by participants could be included in new topics used for future versions of the track. The findings of the study showed that health care professionals paid more attention to the visual attributes of medical images when selecting images and that they applied topical relevancy as the most frequent and most important criterion. The study found that health care professionals looked for medical images mainly for educational and research purposes and judged the relevancy of medical images based on their pictorial information needs and the image resources they used. We identified the difficulties that health care professionals faced when searching medical images in different image resources. Other findings also highlighted the need for, and the value of, looking at narrower subject communities within health and biomedical sciences for better understanding of relevance judgment and image seeking behaviour of the health care professionals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:505570 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Sedghi Ilkhanlar, Shahram |
| Publisher | University of Sheffield |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14647/ |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds