GazeGNN: A Gaze-Guided Graph Neural Network for Disease Classification

The application of eye-tracking techniques in medical image analysis has become increasingly popular in recent years. It collects the visual search patterns of the domain experts, containing much important information about health and disease. Therefore, how to efficiently integrate radiologists' gaze patterns into the diagnostic analysis turns into a critical question. Existing works usually transform gaze information into visual attention maps (VAMs) to supervise the learning process. However, this time-consuming procedure makes it difficult to develop end-to-end algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel gaze-guided graph neural network (GNN), GazeGNN, to perform disease classification from medical scans. In GazeGNN, we create a unified representation graph that models both the image and gaze pattern information. Hence, the eye-gaze information is directly utilized without being converted into VAMs. With this benefit, we develop a real-time, real-world, end-to-end disease classification algorithm for the first time and avoid the noise and time consumption introduced during the VAM preparation. To our best knowledge, GazeGNN is the first work that adopts GNN to integrate image and eye-gaze data. Our experiments on the public chest X-ray dataset show that our proposed method exhibits the best classification performance compared to existing methods.