Visualization of Decision Making in Digital Pathology as Educational Tool

Training in the medical field depends on the teaching of theoretical and practical skills. The acquisition of theoretical basics can be usually achieved by studying various documents, while the training of practical skills requires more intensive discussion and a special setup, such as an appropriate laboratory environment or a mentor-mentee connection. Aside from the conditions for transferring and gaining practical skills, teaching methods mostly concentrate on the sharing of explicit knowledge that can be designated and transferred easily.Therefore, the presented work focuses on the tracking of how to approach the diagnosis in pathological examinations and the visualization of any interaction with the specimen by recording microscopical exploration of an experienced pathologist. Those interactions include the full navigation path through a specimen, the panning and magnification of areas of interest, the observation duration as well as the spoken comments. Each maneuver and annotation that is relevant for approaching the diagnosis is documented, processed and visually prepared for trainees/residents to be able to comprehend argumentation via the look through the eyes of an expert.The collected data serve as a base for various medical applications like learning management systems to support education in the medical field, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in the area of digital pathology.