Objective: To develop and evaluate motor-free procedures via eye tracking for determining cognitive functions in patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) and motor neuron disease (MND).

Background: Many recognized measurements and survey methods to study cognitive functions are based on written/oral in-/output. As a result, the assessment of patients with advanced neurodegenerative diseases such as PD and MND is often limited due to motor impairments.

Methods: We implemented an established "paper-pencil" test (Trail Making Test, Raitan, 1979) for measuring attention (TMT-A) and executive functions (TMT-B) in a special eye tracking software (eTMT). Precision and performance results of PD and MND patients as well as healthy controls (C) were evaluated. Patients were dichotomized either according to above- and below-average ALSFRS-R scores (MND+/MND-) or Hoehn & Yahr scores (≥3: PD-/<3: PD+), respectively. Age, education, wellbeing and personality were assessed as control variables.

Results: 21 subjects with PD, 28 subjects with MNDs and 18 control subjects completed the assessment. 11 severely affected ALS patients (ALS-) were unable to perform the written TMT. Demographic analyses only revealed slight age differences (p.047). Among all groups, the obtained fixation data neither revealed differences in accuracy (p=.06) nor in the relevant eTMT processing times (eTMT-A: p=.31; eTMT-B: p=.09). The age-corrected partial correlations between the TMT-A and eTMT-A (r=.369, p=.05) as well as the TMT-B and eTMT-B (r=.631, p<.001) were significant across all subjects. Differences between subgroups became apparent in the number of fixations per second and written TMT processing times.

Conclusions: The results confirm a high accuracy of the method and indicate a sufficient overlap of each assessed construct. Thus, eye tracking is suitable for the measurement of cognitive performance in patients with neurodegenerative diseases and motor restrictions.

DGN 2015, Duesseldorf, Germany.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/eye-tracking-based-measurement-of-cognitive-functions-in-patients-with-neurodegenerative-diseases/