Talking report approach reduces look-away time

Radiologists may be able to decrease the time they spend looking away from images by funneling all of their reporting system interactions through a microphone rather than a separate report interface, according to researchers at the University of Florida School of Medicine.

Speech recognition systems are expected to converge with point-and-click menu-driven interfaces in the near future to form advanced computerized transcription and reporting systems. Increasingly complex system interfaces extend the time physicians spend looking away from images, however, a trend that raises the red flag for some radiologists.

The Florida researchers instead proposed a "talking template" reporting concept, which would channel most interaction between a report generating system and the radiologist through the microphone. This approach would free the radiologist to view and manipulate the image instead of entering information on a keyboard (J Digit Imaging 2005 Jun 2;[Epub ahead of print]).