Visual search in breast imaging

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among females worldwide and large volumes of breast images are produced and interpreted annually. As long as radiologists interpret these images, the diagnostic accuracy will be limited by human factors and both false-positive and false-negative errors might occur. By understanding visual search in breast images, we may be able to identify causes of diagnostic errors, find ways to reduce them, and also provide a better education to radiology residents. Many visual search studies in breast radiology have been devoted to mammography. These studies showed that 70% of missed lesions on mammograms attract radiologists’ visual attention and that a plethora of different reasons, such as satisfaction of search, incorrect background sampling, and incorrect first impression can cause diagnostic errors in the interpretation of mammograms. Recently, highly accurate tools, which rely on both eye-tracking data and the content of the mammogram, have been proposed to provide feedback to the radiologists. Improving these tools and determining the optimal pathway to integrate them in the radiology workflow could be a possible line of future research. Moreover, in the past few years deep learning has led to improving diagnostic accuracy of computerized diagnostic tools and visual search studies will be required to understand how radiologists interact with the prompts from these tools, and to identify the best way to utilize them. Visual search in other breast imaging modalities, such as breast ultrasound and digital breast tomosynthesis, have so far received less attention, probably due to associated complexities of eye-tracking monitoring and analysing the data. For example, in digital breast tomosynthesis, scrolling through the image results in longer trials, adds a new factor to the study’s complexity and makes calculation of gaze parameters more difficult. However, considering the wide utilization of three-dimensional imaging modalities, more visual search studies involving reading stack-view examinations are required in the future. To conclude, in the past few decades visual search studies provided extensive understanding about underlying reasons for diagnostic errors in breast radiology and characterized differences between experts’ and novices’ visual search patterns. Further visual search studies are required to investigate radiologists’ interaction with relatively newer imaging modalities and artificial intelligence tools.