What attracts the eye to the location of missed and reported breast cancers?

Abstract

The primary detector of breast cancer is the human eye, as it examines mammograms searching for signs of the disease. Nonetheless, it has been shown that 10-30% of all cancers in the breast are not reported by the radiologist, even though most of these are visible retrospectively. Studies of eye position have shown that the eye tends to dwell in the locations of both reported and not reported cancers, indicating that the problem is not faulty visual search, but rather, that is primarily related to perceptual and decision making mechanisms. In this paper we model the areas that attracted the radiologists' visual attention when reading mammograms and that yielded a decision by the radiologist, being this decision overt or covert. We contrast the characteristics of areas that contain cancers that were reported from the ones that contain cancers that, albeit attracting attention, did not reach an internal conspicuity threshold to be reported.