contouring

Goldilocks Contouring: Enriching One-to-One Medical Apprenticeship with Timely and Diverse Expert Feedback

ACM TOCHI 2026The one-to-one apprenticeship in many residency programs, while providing direct supervision from an assigned expert, lacks timely and diverse feedback, especially from other physicians with unique clinical tendencies. This often contributes to subpar training for high-stakes tasks with unstructured solutions, further diminishing education quality and patient safety.

Qualitative Contouring Changes After Completion of Radiation Oncology Resident Clinical Rotations: Secondary Analysis of an International Longitudinal Trial

IJROBP 2026Accurate contouring is essential for high-quality radiation therapy, yet variability remains common during training and beyond in clinical practice. This study qualitatively characterized contouring mistakes across different disease sites before and after site-specific clinical rotations. We hypothesized that residents would exhibit more errors pre-rotation, with improvement following rotation completion.

Enhancing Accuracy, Time Spent, and Ubiquity in Critical Healthcare Delineation via Cross-Device Contouring

DIS 2024Cross‑device contouring lets oncologists use mobile touchscreens to cut planning time while preserving accuracy.

“I’d be watching him contour till 10 o’clock at night”: Understanding Tensions between Teaching Methods and Learning Needs in Healthcare Apprenticeship

CHI 2024Through interviews, workshops, and a global survey, this study uncovered gaps between how contouring is taught and what residents need to learn effectively. While faculty often focus on efficiency, residents seek timely, varied, and cognitively rich feedback. Key challenges include limited support for sharing reasoning and balancing clinical with teaching responsibilities. Sociotechnical solutions are proposed to bridge these gaps, such as using senior learners for peer teaching and capturing cognitive insights through in-situ video feedback.

Patterns of Contouring Mistakes in the Novice Resident: A Qualitative Analysis to Guide Future Educational Efforts

IJROBP 2024 Contouring assessments from novice radiation oncology residents reveal consistent patterns of error across disease sites, including undercontouring lymph nodes and missing key at-risk volumes. Using an interactive online platform during early clinical rotations, the study identifies specific structures frequently overlooked, such as the inguinal nodes in anal cancer and the base of skull in nasopharyngeal cases. These insights can inform targeted educational interventions and support the development of more standardized contouring curricula.

VRContour - Bringing Contour Delineations of Medical Structures Into Virtual Reality

ISMAR 2022VRContour moves radiotherapy contouring from 2-D monitors into immersive VR—combining a tracked tablet with a VR stylus—to let clinicians manipulate full 3-D anatomy, boosting precision and cutting mental load and frustration in a within-subject study of eight users.

Exploring Needs and Design Opportunities for Virtual Reality-based Contour Delineations of Medical Structures

EICS 2022We present an exploratory study that uses iterative design to understand needs and opportunities to bring contour delineation into an immersive 3D space, such as the one enabled by today’s head-mounted VR displays

Evaluating Accuracy, Completion Time and Usability of Everyday Touch Devices for Contouring

ASTRO 2022 Daily re-evaluation of contours associated with adaptive planning is time-intensive and difficult to access. This project evaluated the efficacy of everyday touch devices for contouring using a novel cross-platform interface.

Facilitating Remote Design Thinking Workshops in Healthcare: the Case of Contouring in Radiation Oncology

CHI 2021 Co-location matters, especially when running collaborative design thinking workshops. What if participation cannot occur in person? How can we conduct these workshops remotely?