Quantitative Analysis of Eye-gaze Metrics in Differentiating Surgical Expertise

Eye-tracking plays a crucial role in understanding visual information processing and provides insights into cognitive behaviors. In medicine, gaze patterns help evaluate surgical expertise and training, revealing differences in cognitive workload and visual attention between experts and novices. However, these studies often rely on small sample sizes, limiting generalizability. This necessitates qualitative and quantitative methods to interpret the collective findings in the literature. While the literature contains selective or systematic reviews offering qualitative interpretations, meta-analyses is lacking. This study presents a meta analysis of eye-gaze metrics for assessing surgical expertise, focusing on fixation, and saccade related measures. Fixation frequency and duration, saccade length, and dwell time showed significant differences between expertise, but other metrics did not. Differences in task characteristics are attributed to the different results across measures. Variations in task characteristics explain these differences. advancing understanding of visual attention in medical professionals and informing training and assessment methodologies.