Speech recognition has proved to be a natural interaction modality and an effective technology for medical reporting, in particular in the speciality of radiology. High-volume text creation requirement and the complex structure of these texts make voice technologies useful. By employing speech, professionals in the field can generate reports and do so at a speed that approaches traditional dictation methods.
However, the integration of speech recognition in a user interface creates new problems: speech recognizers may introduce errors and moreover they should be adaptable to spoken language variations.
This paper describes a radiological reporting system and the related motivations for the use of the speech modality. A preliminary evaluation of the system has shown that, on average, although text recalling functions and keyword shortcuts are available, more than two thirds of a radiological report are generated by means of dictation.