A preliminary study to understand tacit knowledge and visual routines of medical experts through gaze tracking

Many decisions made by medical experts are based on scans from advanced imaging technologies. Interpreting a medical image is a trained, systematic procedure and an excellent target for identifying potential visual routines through image informatics. These visual routines derived from experts contain many clues about visual knowledge and its representation. This study uses an inexpensive webcam-based gaze tracking method to collect data from multiple technologists' survey of medical and non-medical images. Through computational analysis of the results, we expect to provide insight into the behaviors and properties related to medical visual routines. Discovering the visual processes associated with medical images will help us recognize and understand the tacit knowledge gained from extensive experience with medical imagery. These expert routines could potentially be used to reduce medical error, train new experts, and provide an understanding of the human visual system in medicine.