GUI Usability in Medical Imaging

The diffusion of computer technologies in everyday life has involved the birth of standard methodologies to control their development. Indeed, the purpose of standardization procedures consists of providing rules aimed to control technologies leaving no space for empirical improvisations. In general, medical software manufacturers provide their applications with graphic user interfaces (GUI) that are not compliant with any clear and standard usability criterion. The only guideline is the creation of GUIs inherited from the ones adopted on medical consoles because physicians use them routinely. This paper addresses this issue: medical software interfaces should be designed trying to overcome the limitations described above. The DICOM standard provides useful mechanisms to transfer medical data by instantiating the related classes and methods. The standard could be extended introducing new data and service models in order to create abstract GUI classes and instantiate them automatically depending on the medical data the physicians would like to analyze.