Diagnosis of Parkinson's disease by eliciting trait-specific eye movements in multi-visual tasks

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder, and eye movement abnormalities are a significant symptom of its diagnosis. In this paper, we developed a multi-task driven by eye movement in a virtual reality (VR) environment to elicit PD-specific eye movement abnormalities. The abnormal features were subsequently modeled by using the proposed deep learning algorithm to achieve an auxiliary diagnosis of PD.

We recruited 114 PD patients and 125 healthy controls and collected their eye-tracking data in a VR environment. Participants completed a series of specific VR tasks, including gaze stability, pro-saccades, anti-saccades, and smooth pursuit. After the tasks, eye movement features were extracted from the behaviors of fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuit to establish a PD diagnostic model.

The performance of the models was evaluated through cross-validation, revealing a recall of 97.65%, an accuracy of 92.73%, and a receiver operator characteristic area under the curve (ROC-AUC) of 97.08% for the proposed model.

We extracted PD-specific eye movement features from the behaviors of fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuit in a VR environment to create a model with high accuracy and recall for PD diagnosis. Our method provides physicians with a new auxiliary tool to improve the prognosis and quality of life of PD patients.