Dissonance Between Law Courts and the Science of Visual Perception in Medical Imaging

Sagar Kulkarni; Sarabjeet Singh; Ajeet Nagi; Avanti Gulhane

doi:10.1016/j.acra.2024.08.011

Dissonance Between Law Courts and the Science of Visual Perception in Medical Imaging

Acad Radiol. 2024 Oct 9:S1076-6332(24)00574-9. doi: 10.1016/j.acra.2024.08.011. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Sagar Kulkarni¹, Sarabjeet Singh², Ajeet Nagi³, Avanti Gulhane²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiology, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, Washington, USA (S.K., S.S., A.G.). Electronic address: skulkarnipapers@protonmail.com.
² Department of Radiology, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, Washington, USA (S.K., S.S., A.G.).
³ Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA (A.N.).

PMID: 39389813
DOI: 10.1016/j.acra.2024.08.011

Abstract

Lawsuits for spending too little time interpreting each radiological image are a vexatious charge to level against a radiologist in medical malpractice court. In this article, we recount two medicolegal cases where the defendant radiologists were accused of missing a life-threatening diagnosis due to not spending enough time reviewing each image. We consider the literature in vision sciences, visual perception in radiology and interpretive biases to demonstrate that using reading speed as evidence of negligence in a malpractice court represents in incorrect understanding of how radiologists perceive images, including three-dimensional volumetric studies.