State of the Art: Eye-Tracking Studies in Medical Imaging

Abstract

Eye-tracking-the process of measuring where people look in a visual field-has been widely used to study how humans process visual information. In medical imaging, eye-tracking has become a popular technique in many applications to reveal how visual search and recognition tasks are performed, providing information that can improve human performance. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of eye-tracking studies conducted with medical images and videos for diverse research purposes, including the identification of the degree of expertise, development of training, and understanding and modeling of visual search patterns. In addition, we present our recent eye-tracking study that involves a large number of screening mammograms viewed by experienced breast radiologists. Based on the eye-tracking data, we evaluate the plausibility of predicting visual attention by computational models.

Keywords

• Medical imaging
• visual attention
• image quality
• eye-tracking
• saliency