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Background: One of the bottlenecks of visualization research is the lack of volunteers for studies that evaluate new methods and paradigms. The increased availability of web-based marketplaces, combined with the possibility of implementing volume rendering, a computationally expensive method, on mobile devices, has opened the door for using gamification in the context of medical image visualization studies.

Objective: We aimed to describe a gamified study that we conducted with the goal of comparing several cerebrovascular visualization techniques and to evaluate whether gamification is a valid paradigm for conducting user studies in the domain of medical imaging.

Methods: The study was implemented in the form of a mobile game, Connect Brain, which was developed and distributed on both Android (Google LLC) and iOS (Apple Inc) platforms. Connect Brain features 2 minigames: one asks the player to make decisions about the depth of different vessels, and the other asks the player to determine whether 2 vessels are connected.

Results: The gamification paradigm, which allowed us to collect many data samples (5267 and 1810 for the depth comparison and vessel connectivity tasks, respectively) from many participants (N=111), yielded similar results regarding the effectiveness of visualization techniques to those of smaller in-laboratory studies.

Conclusions: The results of our study suggest that the gamification paradigm not only is a viable alternative to traditional in-laboratory user studies but could also present some advantages.