Assessment of electrocardiogram visual interpretation strategy based on scanpath analysis

Automated ECG interpretation systems are supposed to follow human expert reasoning. Despite well-established standards, the visual interpretation strategy of the human is still undisclosed today. This paper presents a new approach to the interpretation process research based on eyetrack features captured from a human expert during biosignal visual inspection. This approach required a set of visual tasks consisting in ECG interpretation by volunteers of different degrees of expertise. The recorded eyeglobe trajectories were analysed in the context of medical data represented in the displayed ECG traces and revealed interesting information on diagnostic data distribution and principles of interpretation strategies. The scanpath-derived data make benefit of oculomotoric habits gathering in everyday practice, unconscious mutual perception–recognition interactions and are not affected by human memory or verbalization limits. For these reasons, they provide more objective assessment than any other method willingly controlled by the human. Besides new information about the ECG contents and quantitative descriptions of medical data distribution, our experiment reveals some eyetrack parameters as distinctive for interpretation skills estimation.