Did you miss it? Automatic lung nodule detection combined with gaze information improves radiologists' screening performance

TL;DR

This study explores how integrating gaze data with automatic lung nodule detection can enhance radiologists' screening accuracy, reducing missed detections without increasing false positives, thus improving clinical diagnosis efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method combining gaze information with automatic detection to improve lung nodule screening performance in clinical practice.

Findings

Combining gaze data with automatic detection improves sensitivity.

Gaze patterns correlate with detection errors.

Integration reduces missed nodules without increasing false positives.

Abstract

Early diagnosis of lung cancer via computed tomography can significantly reduce the morbidity and mortality rates associated with the pathology. However, search lung nodules is a high complexity task, which affects the success of screening programs. Whilst computer-aided detection systems can be used as second observers, they may bias radiologists and introduce significant time overheads. With this in mind, this study assesses the potential of using gaze information for integrating automatic detection systems in the clinical practice. For that purpose, 4 radiologists were asked to annotate 20 scans from a public dataset while being monitored by an eye tracker device and an automatic lung nodule detection system was developed. Our results show that radiologists follow a similar search routine and tend to have lower fixation periods in regions where finding errors occur. The overall detection sensitivity of the specialists was 0.67$\pm$0.07, whereas the system achieved 0.69. Combining the annotations of one radiologist with the automatic system significantly improves the detection performance to similar levels of two annotators. Likewise, combining the findings of radiologist with the detection algorithm only for low fixation regions still significantly improves the detection sensitivity without increasing the number of false-positives. The combination of the automatic system with the gaze information allows to mitigate possible errors of the radiologist without some of the issues usually associated with automatic detection system.