Evaluation of Diagnostic Systems: Methods from Signal Detection Theory (Academic Press Series in Cognition and Perception)

Evaluation of Diagnostic Systems: Methods from Signal Detection Theory addresses the many issues that arise in evaluating the performance of a diagnostic system, across the wide range of settings in which such systems are used. These settings include clinical medicine, industrial quality control, environmental monitoring and investigation, machine and metals inspection, military monitoring, information retrieval, and crime investigation. The book is divided into three parts encompassing 11 chapters that emphasize the interpretation of diagnostic visual images by human observers. The first part of the book describes quantitative methods for measuring the accuracy of a system and the statistical techniques for drawing inferences from performance tests. The subsequent part covers study design and includes a detailed description of the form and conduct of an image-interpretation test. The concluding part examines the case study of a medical imaging system that serves as an example of both simple and complex applications. In this part, three mammographic modalities are used: industrial film radiography, low-dose film radiography, and xeroradiography. The case study focuses on the overall reliability of accuracy indices made by its main components, that is, the variabilities across cases, across readers, and within individual readers. The supplementary texts provide study protocols, a computer program for processing test results, and an extensive list of references that will assist the reader in applying those evaluative methods to diagnostic systems in any setting. This book is of value to scientists and engineers, as well as to applied, quantitative, or experimental psychologists who are engaged in the study of the human processes of discrimination and decision making in either perceptual or cognitive tasks.