Warsinsky, Simon

Annotation of medical images (e.g., outlining anaotmical structures in CT or MRI images) is an important task for the creation of training data for supervised machine learning models in healthcare. To ensure adequate annotation quality, medical image annotation tasks are usually done manually by medical professionals with pertinent knowledge about human anatomy. In addition to being error-prone, manual annotation is time-intensive, monotonous and exhausting. Hence, it is often difficult for annotators to stay motivated and engaged with the task, which is however an important determinant of annotation quality. One approach to motivate annotators is gamification, which describes the process of transforming a system or activity into one which affords similar positive experiences and practices as found in games. While gamification has been praised for its motivational effects in domains like fitness apps or surveys, research also suggests that successful gamification design is difficult and requires a good understanding of the specific application context. This umbrella topic invites theses all around the topic of designing successful gamification concepts for medical image annotation tasks. Below are some exemplary topics; however, these can also be modified and own suggestions for topics are also welcome.

Method-wise, I invite both conceptual approaches (e.g., literature reviews) as well as qualitative (e.g., interviews) and quantitative approaches (e.g., surveys, experiments). In general, a method will be chosen based to fit the specific research objective.

Exemplary Topics:

• Investigations on how to design specific gamification elements (e.g., badges, leaderboards) or gamification mechanics (e.g., social comparison) in medical image annotation tasks
• Experimental design on the effects of gamification on cognitive load in annotation tasks
• Review on the impact of gamification on the perceived professionality of information systems in healthcare
• Investigation of conditions when it is actually meaningful to gamify annotation tasks (i.e., "to gamify or not?")
• "Bad Practices" for Gamification concepts for medical image annotation tasks

Introductory Literature

• Koivisto, J., & Hamari, J. (2019). The rise of motivational information systems: A review of gamification research. International Journal of Information Management, 45, 191-210.

• Warsinsky, Simon, et al. "Gamified Expert Annotation Systems: Meta-Requirements and Tentative Design." 17th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology, DESRIST 2022, St Petersburg, FL, USA, June 1–3, 2022,

• Alaghbari, S., Mitschick, A., Blichmann, G., …, Dachselt, R.: Achiever or explorer? gamifying the creation process of training data for machine learning In: Mensch und Computer 2020. ACM, New York, USA (2020)

• Jauer, M.-L., Spicher, N., Deserno, T.M.: Gamification concept for acquisition of medical image segmentation via crowdsourcing. In: Proc. SPIE, Medical Imaging 2021 (2021)

• Lowry, P.B., Petter, S., Leimeister, J.M.: Desperately seeking the artefacts and the foundations of native theory in gamification research: why information systems researchers can play a legitimate role in this discourse and how they can better contribute. European Journal of Information Systems, 29(6), 609–620 (2020)