Improving mouse pointing with eye-gaze targeting: application in radiology

In current radiologists' workstations, a scroll mouse is typically used as the primary input device for navigating image slices and conducting operations on an image. During analysis of 3D MRI and CT volumes thousands of mouse clicks are performed every day, which can cause wrist fatigue. This thesis presents a dynamic Control-to-Display (C-D) gain mouse movement method, controlled by an eye-gaze tracker as the target predictor. By adjusting the C-D gain according to the distance to the target, the target width in motor space is effectively enlarged, thus reducing the index of difficulty. The result from our theoretical analysis and experiment shows that the mouse movement time to a known target can be reduced by up to 15%. In the experiment which used an eye-gaze tracker, the result indicates that the dynamic C-D gain method can improve pointing performance by 8% and increase the accuracy over traditional mouse movement.