Chunxu Yang

Hongyan Gu, Zihan Yan, Ayesha Alvi et al.

The expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) in pathology tasks has intensified the demand for doctors' annotations in AI development. However, collecting high-quality annotations from doctors is costly and time-consuming, creating a bottleneck in AI progress. This study investigates eye-tracking as a cost-effective technology to collect doctors' behavioral data for AI training with a focus on the pathology task of mitosis detection. One major challenge in using eye-gaze data is the low signal-to-noise ratio, which hinders the extraction of meaningful information. We tackled this by levering the properties of inter-observer eye-gaze consistencies and creating eye-gaze labels from consistent eye-fixations shared by a group of observers. Our study involved 14 non-medical participants, from whom we collected eye-gaze data and generated eye-gaze labels based on varying group sizes. We assessed the efficacy of such eye-gaze labels by training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and comparing their performance to those trained with ground truth annotations and a heuristic-based baseline. Results indicated that CNNs trained with our eye-gaze labels closely followed the performance of ground-truth-based CNNs, and significantly outperformed the baseline. Although primarily focused on mitosis, we envision that insights from this study can be generalized to other medical imaging tasks.

Hongyan Gu, Yuan Liang, Yifan Xu et al.

Recent developments in AI have provided assisting tools to support pathologists' diagnoses. However, it remains challenging to incorporate such tools into pathologists' practice; one main concern is AI's insufficient workflow integration with medical decisions. We observed pathologists' examination and discovered that the main hindering factor to integrate AI is its incompatibility with pathologists' workflow. To bridge the gap between pathologists and AI, we developed a human-AI collaborative diagnosis tool -- xPath -- that shares a similar examination process to that of pathologists, which can improve AI's integration into their routine examination. The viability of xPath is confirmed by a technical evaluation and work sessions with twelve medical professionals in pathology. This work identifies and addresses the challenge of incorporating AI models into pathology, which can offer first-hand knowledge about how HCI researchers can work with medical professionals side-by-side to bring technological advances to medical tasks towards practical applications.