Mammography screening in Europe and Australia is carried out by having two radiologists
independently read the case and determine whether an actionable finding is present. If they
disagree, a third radiologist – the arbitrator – reads the case and offers the final opinion. Currently
radiologists are picked for the pair based on scheduling convenience, with no thought being given
to whether a given pair of radiologists should really be put together to read cases. In the past
research has shown that breast radiologists tend to commit the same mistakes time and again and
incline to search mammograms in a particular way; hence, pairing two radiologists that tend to
search a mammogram in an almost similar manner, for example, may not be such a good idea. In
this study, we used eye position tracking to determine how radiologists searched a given set of
cases. Using different cognitive models we paired the radiologists and determined the effect of the
pairing on the radiologist’s performance using the Receivers Operating Characteristic Area Under
the Curve (ROC AUC). Our results suggest that some pairings are detrimental to performance and
should not be put together.
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