As part of a European Union-funded research project called Khresmoi that aims to develop a multilingual search and access system for medical information, researchers used an eye-tracking system to analyze radiologists' behavior as they examined images.
Over several cases and sessions, three radiologists were each asked to perform routine radiology tasks, such as choosing a patient and loading and analyzing image data. Quantitative analysis showed a clear trend for radiologists to focus on small regions-of-interest, according to the researchers.
"This year's eye tracking was at a small scale and also had the goal to find out the administrative difficulties in setting up the equipment (such as anonymizing the recorded videos)," according to presenter Dr. Dimitrios Markonis of the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland. "Next year, a larger study is planned with the first prototypes of the visual retrieval system, and this should even be more conclusive."