Predicting Clinician Fixations on Glaucoma OCT Reports via CNN-Based Saliency Prediction Methods

IEEE Open J Eng Med Biol. 2024 Feb 20:5:191-197. doi: 10.1109/OJEMB.2024.3367492. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Goal: To predict physician fixations specifically on ophthalmology optical coherence tomography (OCT) reports from eye tracking data using CNN based saliency prediction methods in order to aid in the education of ophthalmologists and ophthalmologists-in-training. Methods: Fifteen ophthalmologists were recruited to each examine 20 randomly selected OCT reports and evaluate the likelihood of glaucoma for each report on a scale of 0-100. Eye movements were collected using a Pupil Labs Core eye-tracker. Fixation heat maps were generated using fixation data. Results: A model trained with traditional saliency mapping resulted in a correlation coefficient (CC) value of 0.208, a Normalized Scanpath Saliency (NSS) value of 0.8172, a Kullback-Leibler (KLD) value of 2.573, and a Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.169. Conclusions: The TranSalNet model was able to predict fixations within certain regions of the OCT report with reasonable accuracy, but more data is needed to improve model accuracy. Future steps include increasing data collection, improving quality of data, and modifying the model architecture.

Keywords: Deep learning; optical coherence tomography; saliency prediction.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Columbia University Department of Ophthalmology from Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc., New York, NY USA.