Welcome to Dev Chakraborty's FROC web site
FROC is an acronym for Free-response Receiver Operating Characteristic. FROC analysis is used to objectively evaluate imaging systems or radiologists. It is intended to answer questions like which is the better imaging system for detecting breast cancer? How good is the radiologist at detecting cancer? Etc. Free-response is a localization paradigm. The radiologist marks and rates suspicious locations on images. A rating is the confidence level that the marked region is malignant. The free-response paradigm closely parallels location-specific tasks such as mammography. In contrast the widely used ROC method ignores location information. FROC analysis enables more precise evaluation of imaging systems (greater statistical power). This allows one to show statistically significant inter-modality differences using fewer patients and radiologists. Recent progress in this field has resulted from a connection made between this paradigm and the Kundel-Nodine model of human perception, which led to the Chakraborty search model for the free-response paradigm.
Images courtesy of Dr. Claudia Mello-Thoms.
