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Monitoring of fatigue in radiologists during prolonged image interpretation using fNIRS

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Abstract

Purpose

To determine whether functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) allows monitoring fatigue in radiologists during prolonged image interpretation.

Materials and methods

Nine radiologists participated as subjects in the present study and continuously interpreted medical images and generated reports for cases for more than 4 h under real clinical work conditions. We measured changes in oxygenated hemoglobin concentrations [oxy-Hb] in the prefrontal cortex using 16-channel fNIRS (OEG16ME, Spectratech) every hour during the Stroop task to evaluate fatigue of radiologists and recorded fatigue scale (FS) as a behavior data.

Results

Two subjects showed a subjective feeling of fatigue and an apparent decrease in brain activity after 4 h, so the experiment was completed in 4 h. The remaining seven subjects continued the experiment up to 5 h. FS decreased with time, and a significant reduction was observed between before and the end of image interpretation. Seven out of nine subjects showed a minimum [oxy-Hb] change at the end of prolonged image interpretation. The mean change of [oxy-Hb] at the end of all nine subjects was significantly less than the maximum during image interpretation.

Conclusion

fNIRS using the change of [oxy-Hb] may be useful for monitoring fatigue in radiologists during image interpretation.

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Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, Komaki City Hospital, 1-20 Johbu, Komaki, 485-8520, Aichi, Japan

    Takashi Nihashi & Hiroyasu Umakoshi

  2. Nagoya Jhohoku Radiology Clinic, Nagoya, Japan

    Takeo Ishigaki, Osamu Kaii & Hiromichi Fukushima

  3. Department of Radiology, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

    Hiroko Satake, Shinji Ito & Shinji Naganawa

  4. Department of Radiology, Anjo Kosei Hospital, Anjo, Japan

    Yoshine Mori

  5. Department of Radiological and Medical Laboratory Sciences, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya, Japan

    Kazuhiro Shimamoto

  6. Department of Radiology, Aichi Medical University, Nagakute, Japan

    Kojiro Suzuki

  7. Spectratech, Inc., Tokyo, Japan

    Mitsuo Ohashi & Fumio Kawaguchi

Authors
  1. Takashi Nihashi
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  2. Takeo Ishigaki
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Takashi Nihashi.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical statement

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Komaki City Hospital and Nagoya Jhohoku Radiology Clinic.

Informed consent

A comprehensive explanation of the experiment was given to subjects before this study and written informed consent was obtained. Authors from multi-institute participant in this study, and each author individually and significantly contributed to the research and the manuscript.

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Nihashi, T., Ishigaki, T., Satake, H. et al. Monitoring of fatigue in radiologists during prolonged image interpretation using fNIRS. Jpn J Radiol 37, 437–448 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11604-019-00826-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11604-019-00826-2

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