Original investigationCan a Checklist Reduce SOS Errors in Chest Radiography?1
Section snippets
Experimental Conditions
To test whether a checklist could alter the satisfaction of search effect, we used the same two conditions that were used in previous SOS demonstrations: presentation of each chest radiograph with and without a simulated pulmonary nodule. The detection accuracy for native, subtle lesions was compared with that for those same lesions when a simulated pulmonary nodule was added photographically to the radiograph. Thus the background anatomy and actual lesions were perfectly matched for the two
Results
Figure 2 presents a graphic representation of the results of the current experiment and those of earlier experiments. In the checklist experiment, the paired t-test on contaminated binormal areas found no significant difference without and with added nodules (0.67 versus 0.68, t(19) = −0.56, P = .58); the checklist eliminated the SOS effect. The SOS experiment (3) previously reported a t-test on the data of the 19 observers, demonstrating an SOS effect on area. We repeated this analysis just on
Discussion
Describing visual search during radiologic interpretation in the previous experiment was not designed to prevent the SOS effect (5); that result was entirely unexpected. The verbal descriptions were collected to help find the causes of SOS. The authors explained the protection from SOS by proposing that observers formulated an internal checklist on the fly to help them with reporting their search behavior. The results of the current experiment show that this explanation cannot be correct. An
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Checklists for Interpreting Chest Radiographs: A Scoping Review
2023, Journal of Radiology NursingInvestigating the impact of cognitive biases in radiologists’ image interpretation: A scoping review
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2022, Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation SciencesCitation Excerpt :Kim and Mansfield [15] attribute this as errors of location whereby important musculoskeletal findings are overlooked at chest radiograph interpretation because it is outside the area of interest on an image. This type of error, according to the authors also falls into the “satisfaction of search” category which was stated as the second most common errors encountered during image interpretation [15] and is a well-recognised phenomenon in chest image interpretation [15,16,34,35]. In the current study, each image is presumed to contain one pathology according to the consultant radiologist's report but since the images were not validated by the arbiter(s), this error cannot be completely ruled out amongst the participants of this study.
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Supported by USPHS Grants R01 EB/CA00145, R01 EB/CA00863, R01 CA42453, and R01 CA62362 from the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD.