Developing Smart Clinician Support Systems from Patients’ Eye Movement Data: an Exploratory Study

Smart clinician support systems using biomarkers such as patients' eye movements can significantly enhance the assessment of chronic pain which traditionally relies on subjective self-reports. This exploratory study expands research on eye-movement data as a potential biomarker for chronic pain assessment by investigating two relevant eye-movement metrics that have not been considered by the chronic pain literature: Fixation Inner Density (FID) and baseline-corrected Pupil Diameter (PD). Data was collected from participants with and without chronic pain as they answered pain-related surveys. Our results suggest that FID and PD can provide objective insights into attentional biases related to chronic pain, offering promising avenues for developing smart Clinician Decision Support Systems (CDSS) that use biomarkers to enhance pain assessment and management. Future research will focus on validating these preliminary results with larger sample sizes and exploring the scalability of these metrics for clinical applications.