This thesis has medical image perception as its central theme and it contains selected publications in that discipline from 1998 to 2010. Other aspects of medical imaging and related subjects have played their part in my research and teaching over a longer period but through my PhD and in the postdoctoral years the subject area dominating my academic thinking has been the. sources of error in the interpretation of medical images. Medical image perception is a mature science and several authors have published historical accounts of its origins and development. Probably the most comprehensive of these appeared in the Journal of the American College of Radiologists (Kundel 2006) based on material used in a keynote lecture to the Medical Image Perception Society Conference in 2003. Although it is a personal account it captures the dynamic of empirical research in medical image perception from the first recorded formal experiment in radiological error (Birkelo et al194 7) to the present. The covering work to the thesis emphasises the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to medical image perception and radiological error. I This has been the guiding principle behind the published work contained here, drawing on ideas and methods from physics, radiology, psychology, computer science and ergonomics. Through this broad-fronted approach the body of work has made original contributions to the field which have been extended and continue to be developed by others.