알츠하이머 초기 진단을 위한 Microsaccades 기반 디지털마커 연구

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible neuro degenerative disease, and associated declines in cognitive function have a significant effect on daily life. Methods such as mini-mental state examination and Montreal cognitive assessment, the existing diagnostic methods for Alzheimer’s disease, take a long time and have poor objective assess- ment score accuracy. This paper presents a novel method that assesses the brain's cognitive state by utilizing eye- tracking technology to measure abnormal fixational eye movement patterns of microsaccades, which are involuntary eye movements, and changes in pupil size using eye-tracking technology in nervous system diseases. The exper- iment results confirmed that the number of microsaccades occurrences on the x and y axes gradually increased as aging progressed. In addition, it was confirmed that the number of microsaccades occurrences increased as cognitive function scores declined, even among seniors in the same age groups. In the case of pupil size, it was observed that the amplitude of pupil size variation decreases with increasing age, along with a reduction in both constriction and dilation rates. This paper proves the correlation between aging and the brain’s cognitive functions and verifies that declines in the brain’s cognitive functions affect microsaccades and changes in pupil size