CAREER: Collaborative Image Manipulation and Annotation in Surgical Telemedicine

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The objective of this project is to investigate the benefit of collaborative image interaction in conveying expert knowledge during distributed work. Although there have been great advances in the compression and transfer of audio and video signals for telecommunication, there is still a significant challenge in providing the appropriate tools for conveying expert knowledge in distributed work settings. Surgical telemedicine is one domain where collaborative interaction with highly specialized images is vital for the efficient and effective conveyance of expert information, and the collaborating individuals may not have the same level of expertise. In this research the PI will systematically ascertain the challenges of expert distributed communication of technical images and the benefits that collaborative image interaction has in conveying expert knowledge in distributed work. Because the findings from this research will be translatable to other expert distributed environments that utilize imagery in order to have a positive effect on distributed collaborative work practices, project outcomes will have broad implications aside from the immediate benefit of providing manipulation and annotation ability on images for distributed collaborative work to support healthcare. The project will provide educational experiences at multiple levels by including high school, undergraduate, and graduate students in this interdisciplinary research. Because the PI will actively engage and mentor under-represented groups throughout the project, the work may also increase the number of underrepresented minorities and women in science and technology. Finally, the PI will disseminate results broadly in both the medical and HCI literature, and coordinate workshops at the respective yearly conferences, in order to engage a wider audience of researchers and system designers.This work is part of a long term effort by the PI in investigating how images play a part in scientific and medical collaborative practices, particularly with regards to how both professionals and lay people perceive the information through images and, in turn, the effects of new mechanisms for sensing, presenting, and interacting with those images. The research aims are: to determine the verbal and non-verbal mechanisms for conveying expert knowledge in co-located and distributed collaboration with images; to develop a prototype for distributed collaborative image interaction; to determine the effects of collaborative image interaction on expert communication processes and performance outcomes; and to determine the effects of and the reactions to collaborative image interaction on distributed work practices. The educational objective is to produce scholars with a deep understanding of collaborative technology design and social science evaluation on health information system success. This is part of a long-term effort by the PI to engage under-represented groups in computer and information science by exposing them to the process of developing technology solutions to real world problems. Specific educational activities will include development of an internship program for high school students to participate in research and systems design on the real-world problems of the operating room, and development of a cross-listed graduate course on telemedicine that utilizes a project-based curriculum to bring together the expertise of graduate students from three different UMBC graduate programs: Information Systems, Human Centered Computing, and Health IT.