Designing a digital pathology workstation for routine practice

The role of the pathology lab is important in the future of cancer care. In orderto further personalize the care for cancer patients, more precise review of tumorspecimens is needed in order to guide clinicians between different treatmentstrategies.New digital imaging technologies is one promising possibility that might allowpathologists performing more and better work with the same amount ofresources. Early scanning systems and workstations have been shown to beinefficient and have not met the pathologists’ needs, who still perform most oftheir diagnostic work with mechanical microscopes.In this thesis, we analyze the pathologist\u27s work with early digital workstationsand present a set of new solutions in order to increase the performance of theinteraction with these systems.First, we review the implementation process of two current digital systems intwo pathology labs in Sweden (Paper I), followed by study of the navigationbehavior that is performed by pathologists when they explore large digital slidesof cancer specimens (Paper II).With a specific focus on design solutions that work within medical routinepractice, three different input devices for navigation in large images wascompared with pathologists as participants (Paper III), as well as a visualizationtechnique, inspired by semantic zoom in order to facilitate certain tasks forpathologists (Paper IV).The results provided in this thesis points towards the same conclusion that havemade in other domains: When good usability engineering is combined withtechnological advances, this can make novel technology become useful for real.For a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher, the pathologist caserepresents an especially demanding use of zoomable user interfaces. This hasdriven us to enhance efficiency of such interfaces further in order for them tobecome useful. The research findings offered within this thesis are particularlyimportant to the field of digital pathology. However, our findings could alsohave a bearing on the design of zoomable user interfaces