Brain computed tomography reading of stroke patients by resident doctors from different medical specialities: An eye-tracking study

Background: Using the eye-tracking technique, our work aimed to examine whether difference in clinical background may affect the training outcome of resident doctors’ interpretation skills and reading behaviour related to brain computed tomography (CT). Methods: Twelve resident doctors in the neurology, radiology, and emergency departments were recruited. Each participant had to read CT images of the brain for two cases. We evaluated each participant's accuracy of lesion identification. We also used the eye-tracking technique to assess reading behaviour. We recorded dwell times, fixation counts, run counts, and first-run dwell times of target lesions to evaluate visual attention. Transition entropy was applied to assess the temporal relations and spatial dynamics of systematic image reading. Results: The eye-tracking results showed that the image reading sequence examined by transition entropy was comparable among resident doctors from different medical specialties (p = 0.82). However, the dwell time of the target lesions was shorter for the resident doctors from the neurology department (4828.63 ms, p = 0.01) than for those from the resident doctors from the radiology (6275.88 ms) and emergency (5305.00 ms) departments. The eye-tracking results in individual areas of interest only showed differences in the eye-tracking performance of the first-run dwell time (p = 0.05) in the anterior cerebral falx. Discussion: Our findings demonstrate that resident doctors from different medical specialties may achieve similar imaging reading patterns for brain CT. This may mitigate queries regarding the influence of different backgrounds on training outcomes.