Relevance criteria for medical images applied by health care professionals : A grounded theory study.

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.