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

Background: 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.

Methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusion: 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.