Gaze Tracking to Learn Mammography

"An experiment showed that a novice could be subtly guided to follow an expert’s scanpath across a mammogram and that this subtle nudging improved the novice’s accuracy. The experimental results will be presented at the Eye Tracking Research & Application Symposium this March.  Grimm and her colleagues say the technique, should it prove durable, is widely applicable to visual search tasks. Not only might it improve the reading of mammograms and other types of medical images, such as MRIs and PET scans, but it might also be used to improve the accuracy of airport screening and learning in virtual environments. According to her, expert diagnostic radiologists have a particular search pattern that is not the same as that of a novice, they tend to do a fairly broad scan and then fixate on parts of the image that have a tumor-like texture. "

Cindy M. Grimm, PhD is an associate professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Further reading & Reference:

Visual nudge improves accuracy of mammogram readings