Assessment of computational visual attention models on medical images
Varun Jampani, Ujjwal, Jayanthi Sivaswamy, Vivek Vaidya · 2012
Several computational visual saliency models have been proposed in the context of viewing natural scenes. We aim to investigate the relevance of computational saliency models in medical images in the context of abnormality detection. We report on two studies aimed at understanding the role of visual saliency in medical images. Diffuse lesions in Chest X-Ray images, which are characteristic of Pneumoconiosis and high contrast lesions such as 'Hard Exudates' in retinal images were chosen for the study. These approximately correspond to conjunctive and disjunctive targets in a visual search task. Saliency maps were computed using three popular models namely Itti-Koch [7], GBVS [3] and SR [4]. The obtained maps were evaluated against gaze maps and ground truth from medical experts.