The visualisation of eye-tracking scanpaths: what can they tell us about how clinicians view electrocardiograms?

This paper describes the use of the Levenshtein distance and nearest neighbour index to visualise and analyse differences in eye-tracking scanpaths applied to the field of electrocardiology. Data was obtained from clinicians as they interpreted 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs). The main aim of the work is provide methods of visualising the differences between multiple participants scanpaths simultaneously. Allowing us to answer questions such as, do clinicians fixate randomly on the ECG, or do they apply a systematic approach? Results indicate that practitioners have very different search strategies applied to the majority of stimuli. The distribution of fixations is not random and tends towards clustering with all stimuli. The differences between practitioners are likely to be the result of different training, clinical role and expertise.