One the new research says that “Studying Everyday Eye
Movements Could Aid in Diagnosis of Neurological Disorders”
Image Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1413744
Researchers at USC have devised a method for detecting
certain neurological disorders through the study of eye movements.
In a study published August 30 in the Journal of
Neurology, researchers claim that because Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD), Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Parkinson's Disease
each involve ocular control and attention dysfunctions, they can be easily
identified through an evaluation of how patients move their eyes while they
watch television.
"Natural attention and eye movement behavior -- like
a drop of saliva -- contains a biometric signature of an individual and her/his
state of brain function or dysfunction," the article states. "Such
individual signatures, and especially potential biomarkers of particular
neurological disorders which they may contain, however, have not yet been successfully
decoded."
Typical methods of detection -- clinical evaluation,
structured behavioral tasks and neuroimaging -- are costly, labor-intensive and
limited by a patient's ability to understand and comply with instructions.
To solve this problem, doctoral student Po-He Tseng and
Professor Laurent Itti of the Department of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi
School of Engineering, along with collaborators at Queen's University in
Canada, have devised a new screening method.
Participants in the study were simply instructed to
"watch and enjoy" television clips for 20 minutes while their eye
movements were recorded. Eye-tracking data was then combined with normative
eye-tracking data and a computational model of visual attention to extract 224
quantitative features, allowing the team to use new machine-learning techniques
to identify critical features that differentiated patients from control
subjects.
With eye movement data from 108 subjects, the team was
able to identify older adults with Parkinson's Disease with 89.6 percent
accuracy, and children with either ADHD or FASD with 77.3 percent accuracy.
Providing new insights into which aspects of attention
and gaze control are affected by specific disorders, the team's method provides
considerable promise as an easily deployed, low-cost, high-throughput screening
tool, especially for young children and elderly populations who may be less
compliant to traditional tests.
"For the first time, we can actually decode a
person's neurological state from their everyday behavior, without having to
subject them to difficult or time-consuming tests," Itti said.
Funding for the research came from the National Science
Foundation, the Army Research Office, the Human Frontier Science Program and
the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Image Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1413744
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