Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

M. Stella Atkins

M. Stella Atkins, Medical Image Computing Analysis (MICA) Laboratory, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Eye gaze tracking for medical applications: a window into the mind

Wednesday November 22, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Room 3875, SFU Surrey Campus, third floor Central City Tower in the Research Labs

Abstract

My research is focused on the use of computers in the medical domain. One ongoing project of the Medical Image Computing Analysis Laboratory at SFU involves the use of eye gaze tracking. This talk introduces the basic science involved in eye gaze tracking and the hardware we use, and describes two medical applications: in radiology workstation design, and in virtual laparoscopy training.

In radiology workstation design, we are aiming to improve the task of softcopy reading, where 3D medical images are displayed on computer monitors instead of traditional film lightboxes. We developed new user interfaces for navigating the images, and tested these approaches with radiology look-alike tasks. We measured the performance and tracked the eye gaze of several subjects while they performed the task. In this talk I will show what the radiologists are looking at as they complete their tasks, and how the time of gaze on the images may help us to identify erroneous decisions.

Laparoscopic surgery requires very difficult eye-hand co-ordination. We hypothesized that novices and experts would have different eye gaze strategies during surgery. We validated this hypothesis by tracking the eye gaze of expert surgeons and novices using a virtual surgery simulator. Experts gazed mostly at the target, whereas novices tended to track the tool. These results may be useful in developing training strategies for novice surgeons.

Bio

M. Stella Atkins is a Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, and Co-Director of the Medical Image Computing Analysis Lab at SFU. Her research interests include medical image display and analysis, and computers in medicine. This includes medical image segmentation, brain atrophy studies, image registration, denoising and enhancement, and radiology workstation design. Additionally, she is interested in the use of eyetrackers, which provide a new imaging modality for seeing inside the brain, and other sensors for measuring physiological signals. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia in 1985, and her BSc degree in Chemistry from Nottingham University, England, in 1966.

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