GazeSearch: Radiology Findings Search Benchmark
This work addresses the need for more focused eye-tracking data to improve deep learning models for X-ray analysis and interpretability in radiology, though it is incremental as it refines existing datasets.
The authors tackled the problem of dispersed and ambiguous medical eye-tracking data by creating GazeSearch, a curated visual search dataset for radiology findings, and introduced a baseline method for scan path prediction, which they used to benchmark state-of-the-art methods in medical imaging.
Medical eye-tracking data is an important information source for understanding how radiologists visually interpret medical images. This information not only improves the accuracy of deep learning models for X-ray analysis but also their interpretability, enhancing transparency in decision-making. However, the current eye-tracking data is dispersed, unprocessed, and ambiguous, making it difficult to derive meaningful insights. Therefore, there is a need to create a new dataset with more focus and purposeful eyetracking data, improving its utility for diagnostic applications. In this work, we propose a refinement method inspired by the target-present visual search challenge: there is a specific finding and fixations are guided to locate it. After refining the existing eye-tracking datasets, we transform them into a curated visual search dataset, called GazeSearch, specifically for radiology findings, where each fixation sequence is purposefully aligned to the task of locating a particular finding. Subsequently, we introduce a scan path prediction baseline, called ChestSearch, specifically tailored to GazeSearch. Finally, we employ the newly introduced GazeSearch as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of current state-of-the-art methods, offering a comprehensive assessment for visual search in the medical imaging domain. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/UARK-AICV/GazeSearch}.