Researchers in the School of Computing win best paper award for work on digital pathology

University of Leeds researchers including Professor Roy Ruddle and Rhys Thomas from the School of Computing win the 2016 TOCHI best paper award.

Entitled "The Design and Evaluation of Interfaces for Navigating Gigapixel Images in Digital Pathology", the paper was selected based on the overall merit of the work, in terms of technical excellence, significance to the research community, impact, clarity of presentation, and scope of the contribution for the inaugural ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction Best Paper Award.

The research was authored by Professor Roy Ruddle and Rhys Thomas from the School of Computing, Dr Rebecca Randell from the School of Healthcare, Professor Philip Quirke from the Leeds Institute of Cancer and Pathology, and Dr Darren Treanor from St James’ University Hospital.

The following abstract characterizes the work in the authors’ own words:

"The article describes the design and evaluation of two generations of an interface for navigating datasets of gigapixel images that pathologists use to diagnose cancer. The interface design is innovative because users panned with an overview:detail view scale difference that was up to 57 times larger than established guidelines, and 1 million pixel “thumbnail” overviews that leveraged the real estate of high-resolution workstation displays. 

The research involved experts performing real work (pathologists diagnosing cancer), using datasets that were up to 3,150 times larger than those used in previous studies that involved navigating images. The evaluation provides evidence about the effectiveness of the interfaces and characterizes how experts navigate gigapixel images when performing real work. Similar interfaces could be adopted in applications that use other types of high-resolution images (e.g., remote sensing or high-throughput microscopy)."

Read the full paper: 'The Design and Evaluation of Interfaces for Navigating Gigapixel Images in Digital Pathology' Ruddle, R; Thomas, R; Randell, R; Quirke, P; Treanor , ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) TOCHI Homepage archive, Volume 23 Issue 1, February 2016, Article No. 5.