How do you … Look?

How Do You Look? (2003-2006) was a Wellcome Trust funded project carried out jointly with Imperial College Computing Department (IC) and St Mary’s Hospital London. The role of Imperial College was confined to providing eye tracking equipment for the surgical part of the project. The project’s main thrust was to apply to laparoscopic surgery the research methodology we had developed over the years with artists. This consisted in observing the surgeon’s eye movements in order to understand his eye-hand strategies and, on this basis, devise ways of teaching surgery trainees. A training DVD “General Eye Movement Catalogue (GEMC)” 2003 was produced and presented at 12th European Conference on Eye Movements, Dundee 2003 “Visual Search in Parallel Environments – eye-hand coordination in minimal access surgery”. The results were also presented in an invited lecture in Tampere University, Finland “A Painter’s Eye – observing an expert in Visual Perception” March 2004. During the course of the project, Sir Professor Ara Darzi was eye tracked and filmed performing laparoscopic cholysystectomy (gall bladder extraction) which, to our knowledge, constitutes a world first which, in all likelihood, will remain for some time the only available reference on the subject of eye-hand coordination in real-world keyhole surgery. The U.K. touring exhibition, film, and dedicated website [www.howdoyoulook.co.uk], opened in an art gallery (Dulwich Picture Gallery London) and progressed to its final venue, a medical institute (Hunterian Museum London) where it was accompanied by a series of lectures including "Many look but few see – Leonardo da Vinci" by Francis Wells FRCS.