JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

One of the bottlenecks of visualization research is the lack of volunteers for studies that evaluate new methods and paradigms. The increased availability of online marketplaces, combined with the possibility of implementing volume rendering, a computationally expensive method, on mobile devices, has opened the door for using gamification in the context of medical image visualization studies.

Objective:

We describe a gamified study that we performed with the goal of comparing several cerebrovascular visualization techniques, but also to evaluate whether the gamification is a valid paradigm for conducting user studies in the domain of medical imaging.

Methods:

The study was implemented in the form of a mobile game, "Connect Brain", that was developed and distributed on both Android and iOS platforms. Connect Brain features two mini-games, one of which asks the player to make decisions about the depth of different vessels, and the second one that has them determine if two vessels are connected.

Results:

The gamification paradigm, which allowed us to collect more data samples from more participants, had similar results regarding the effectiveness of visualization techniques to larger in-lab studies.

Conclusions:

The results of our study suggest that the gamification paradigm is not only a viable alternative to traditional in-lab user studies, but it could also present some advantages.