Eye movement behavior identification for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis

Abstract

We develop a deep-learning approach to differentiate between the eye movement behavior of people with neurodegenerative diseases during reading compared to healthy control subjects. The subjects with and without Alzheimer’s disease read well-defined and previously validated sentences including high- and low-predictable sentences, and proverbs. From these eye-tracking data trial-wise information is derived consisting of descriptors that capture the reading behavior of the subjects. With this information a set of denoising sparse-autoencoders are trained and a deep neural network is built using the trained autoencoders and a softmax classifier that identifies subjects with Alzheimer’s disease with 89.78% accuracy. The results are very encouraging and show that such models promise to be helpful for understanding the dynamics of eye movement behavior and its relation with underlying neuropsychological processes.

Keywords

• |eye-tracking|deep-learning|alzheimer’s disease|neurodegenerative diseases|eye movement behavior|neuropsychological processes