Multi-modal Interaction in Biomedicine - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 194

Fig. 6. Simplified use-case diagram for the VRE system.

4.3 User Groups and Types

End-users of the VRE are people who use the system as a tool for conducting
experiments. It is expected that the VRE will be used for the interactive decision
support by vascular surgeons, radiologists (both diagnostic and interventional)
and technologists 7 .
An unexpected finding of the experiment conducted was the identification
of an extra potential user group - technicians [8]. They form one of the most
perspective user groups of the VRE, since they currently use diagnosis and plan-
ning systems to prepare scan images for radiologists and surgeons, so that they
could assess these images as quick as possible. In some cases, technicians and
radiologists perform the first assessment of these images together. Depending on
the scope of the VRE in future the needs and requirements for this user group
may need to be taken into consideration as well.
Like it was mentioned earlier, two user groups participated in the experiment
on user profiling: vascular surgeons and interventional radiologists. We tried to
categorize people that we interviewed and observed and as a result came up with
the following classification of the potential users of the VRE system.

7 Vascular technologists are people from scientific or radiography background. They
conduct patients' testing using special equipment, including MRA/MRI/CT scan-
ners, for diagnosis of arterial and venous diseases.