Radiologists' Gaze Characterization During Lung Nodule Search in Thoracic CT

Lung cancer diagnosis is made by radiologists through nodule search in chest Computed Tomography (CT) scans. This task is known to be difficult and prone to errors that can lead to late diagnosis. Although Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems are promising tools to be used in clinical practice, experienced radiologists continue to perform better diagnosis than CADs. This paper proposes a methodology for characterizing the radiologist's gaze during nodules search in chest CT scans. The main goals are to identify regions that attract the radiologists' attention, which can then be used for improving a lung CAD system, and to create a tool to assist radiologists during the search task. For that purpose, the methodology processes the radiologists' gaze and their mouse coordinates during the nodule search. The resulting data is then processed to obtain a 3D gaze path from which relevant attention studies can be derived. To better convey the found information, a reference model of the lung that eases the communication of the location of relevant anatomical/pathological findings is also proposed. The methodology is tested on a set of 24 real-practice gazes, recorded via an Eye tracker, from 3 radiologists.