Author: Stephen Thompson

what-is-it is a browser based game. It was developed primarily to study and communicate the problem of "limited field of view", how does only seeing part of an object effect our ability to identify the object? Limited field of view is a common problem in key hole surgery where the surgeon is only able to see a tiny part of the anatomy through a key hole camera.

To make what-is-it playable for non surgeons we've used drawings of everyday objects taken from The from Google's Quickdraw data set. Each drawing is drawn by a human and correctly identified by Google's AI.

The game starts with complete images, and a multiple choice list from which you can select the most likely answer. Once you've warmed up (got 3 correct answers in a row) we introduce an image mask based on a medical ultrasound probe to make it harder. We used an ultrasound probe as a second aspect of the game design was to study ways to simulate ultrasound imaging for the general public. The presence of speckle type noise is often cited as a difficulty in using ultrasound imaging.

Play it here

what-is-it is developed with the support of the Wellcome EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences as part of the SciKit-Surgery software project.

Copyright 2019 Stephen Thompson. What is It? is released under the BSD-3 license. Please see the license file for details.

Supported by Wellcome and EPSRC.