Digital Pathology (DP) reporting workstations permit eye tracking experiments which can aid our understanding of reading strategies and medical errors in pathology. However, eye tracking with DP slides is complex due to the nature of the slide viewing process: slide panning and zooming. Eye tracking technology records gaze coordinates to a screen surface, but these coordinates do not account for the ever-changing on-screen content (due to slide navigation), and therefore it is essential to track pathologists’ slide navigation to determine where on the slide the pathologist has viewed and what features were fixated. Additionally, visualising the resulting eye tracking data proves challenging due to the zooming component. Other eye tracking studies in DP have accounted for slide navigation by employing custom slide viewers that output slide movements as a data stream with the eye tracking data which are co-registered for analysis. We are conducting a DP eye tracking study using a commercial slide viewer which has been adopted at selected UK hospital sites, but slide movement data cannot be outputted as a data stream in this context. Therefore, we’re developing a software platform using computer vision techniques that can be applied to the recorded screen capture of the DP workstation which is synchronised with the eye tracking data. The developed algorithm could be adapted for use with other commercial slide viewers for future studies. Here, we explore how studies have addressed these issues and we discuss our approach.
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