Investigation of human interpretation process based on eyetrack features of biosignal visual inspection

Although well standardized, the human interpretation of biosignals highly depends on the observer experience and personal skills. In this paper, a new eyetrack-based approach is proposed for quantitative assessment of these important factors. The visual experiment carried out on cardiologists of various professional experience supplied the scanpaths data for the analysis in context of observed ECG traces. Selected parameters of the cardiologist eye trajectory were particularly correlating with the declared proficiency and the recording complexity, and thus may be interesting as an objective assessment tool for the professional staff survey. The paper proposes also a focus attention-based analysis of the human interpretation procedure and its evolution with the growth of experience. The proposed approach, without the verbalization necessity, allows the cardiologists know-how to be extracted, analyzed and implemented in the automatic interpretation algorithm for better emulate the human way of thinking.