A brief review of human perception factors in digital displays for picture archiving and communications systems.

The purpose of this review is to further inform radiologists, physicists, technologists, and engineers working with digital image display devices of issues related to human perception. This article will briefly review the effects of several factors in human perception that are specifically relevant to a digital display environment. These factors include the following: the spatial and contrast resolution of the display device; background luminance level and luminance range of the display system; brightness uniformity; extraneous light in the reading room; displayed field size; viewing distance; image motion and monitor flickering; signal to noise ratio of the displayed image; magnification functions; and the user interface. After reviewing the perception study results, a checklist of desirable features and quality assurance issues for a digital display workstation are presented as an appendix.