GazeVis: Interactive 3D Gaze Visualization for Contiguous Cross-Sectional Medical Images

Gaze visualization has been used to understand the results from gaze tracking studies in a wide range of fields. In the medical field, diagnoses of medical images have been studied with gaze tracking technology to understand how radiologists read medical images. While prior work were mainly based on diagnosis with a single image, recent work focused on diagnosis with consecutive cross-sectional medical images acquired from preoperative computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In the diagnosis, radiologists scroll through a stack of images to get a 3D cognition of organs and lesions. Thus, it is important to understand radiologists' gaze patterns three dimensionally across such contiguous cross-sectional images. However, little has been done to visualize more complicated gaze patterns from the contiguous cross-sectional medical images. To address this problem, we present an interactive 3D gaze visualization tool, GazeVis, where InfoVis and SciVis techniques are harmonized to show the abstract gaze data along with a realistic 3D rendering of the visual stimuli (i.e., organs and lesions). We present case studies with 12 radiologists who use GazeVis to investigate gaze patterns of their colleagues with different levels of expertise, providing empirical evidences about the competence of our gaze visualization system.