Oculometric Testing for Detecting/Characterizing Mild Neural Impairment

Health Medicine and Biotechnology
Oculometric Testing for Detecting/Characterizing Mild Neural Impairment (TOP2-268)
Comprehensive Oculomotor Behavioral Response Assessment (COBRA)
Overview
This novel technology is a screening tool to screen for neurological disorders or injury detecting oculomotor signatures. The tool can be used to measure/monitor the severity and nature of such symptoms. Eye movements are the most frequent, shortest-latency, and biomechanically simplest voluntary motor behavior, and thus provide a model system to assess perceptual and sensory processing disturbances arising from trauma, fatigue, aging, environmental exposures, or disease states. Scientists at NASA have developed and validated a rapid, non-invasive, eye-movement-based testing system to evaluate neural health across a range of brain regions. The technology applies a 5-minute behavioral tracking task consisting of randomized step-ramp radial target motion to capture several aspects of neural responses to dynamic visual stimuli, including pursuit initiation, steady-state tracking, direction and speed tuning, pupillary responses, and eccentric gaze holding.

The Technology
To assess various aspects of dynamic visual and visuomotor function including peripheral attention, spatial localization, perceptual motion processing, and oculomotor responsiveness, NASA developed a simple five-minute clinically relevant test that measures and computes more than a dozen largely independent eye-movement-based (oculometric) measures of human neural performance. This set of oculomotor metrics provide valid and reliable measures of dynamic visual performance and may prove to be a useful assessment tool for mild functional neural impairments across a wide range of etiologies and brain regions. The technology may be useful to clinicians to localize affected brain regions following trauma, degenerative disease, or aging, to characterize and quantify clinical deficits, to monitor recovery of function after injury, and to detect operationally-relevant altered or impaired visual performance at subclinical levels. This novel system can be used as a sensitive screening tool by comparing the oculometric measures of an individual to a normal baseline population, or from the same individual before and after exposure to a potentially harmful event (e.g., a boxing match, football game, combat tour, extended work schedule with sleep disruption, blast or toxic exposure, space mission), or on an ongoing basis to monitor performance for recovery to baseline. The technology provides set of largely independent metrics of visual and visuomotor function that are sensitive and reliable within and across observers, yielding a signature multidimensional impairment vector that can be used to characterize the nature of a mild deficit, not just simply detect it. Initial results from peer-reviewed studies of Traumatic Brain Injury, sleep deprivation with and without caffeine, and low-dose alcohol consumption have shown that this NASA technology can be used to assess subtle deficits in brain function before overt clinical symptoms become obvious, as well as the efficacy of countermeasures.
COBRA summary chart.   This full set of oculometrics illustrates the wealth of data captured in 5 minutes.  The pattern of effects across metrics is different depending on the cause of the neural impairment, thus potentially supporting future diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.
Benefits
  • Fast: scans take ~5 minutes
  • Portable: compact, deployable system
  • Inexpensive compared to CT/MRI or other current clinical imaging systems
  • Evaluates status of brain function, not structure, so has direct operational implications
  • Does not expose patients to radiation
  • Analysis routines are automated and compatible with disparate data collection methods
  • Customized user defined setting in software

Applications
  • Sports training and medicine
  • Military and Aerospace readiness-to-perform
  • Medicine - Hospitals (ER and Trauma Centers) - Ophthalmology clinics - Universities - Clinical research facilities
Technology Details

Health Medicine and Biotechnology
TOP2-268
ARC-17386-1 ARC-17386-2 ARC-17386-3 ARC-17837-1
9,730,582 10,463,249 11,419,494 10,420,465
https://doi.org/10.1113/JP277779 Distinct pattern of oculomotor impairment associated with acute sleep loss and circadian misalignment - Stone - 2019 - https://journals.lww.com/optvissci/Fulltext/2017/01000/Oculometric_Assessment_of_Sensorimotor_Impairment.9.aspx The Journal of Physiology - Wiley Online Library; Oculometric Assessment of Sensorimotor Impairment Associated with TBI - Optometry and Vision Science 94(1)
Similar Results
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Computer-Brain Interface for Display Control
The basis of the NASA innovation is the brain signal created by flashing light, referred to as a Visually-Evoked Cortical Potential (VECP). The VECP brain signal can be detected by electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements recorded by electrode sensors placed over the brain’s occipital lobe. In the case of the NASA innovation, the flashing light is embedded as an independent function in an electronic display, e.g. backlit LCD or OLED display. The frequency of the flashing light can be controlled separate from the display refresh rate frequency so as to provide a large number of different frequencies for identifying specific display pixels or pixel regions. Also, the independently controlled flashing allows flashing rates to be chosen such that the display user sees no noticeable flickering. Further, because the VECP signal is correlated with the frequency of the signal in specific regions of the display, the approach determines the absolute location of eye fixation, eliminating the need to calibrate the gaze tracker to the display. Another key advantage of this novel method of brain-display eye gaze tracking is that it is only sensitive to where the user is focused and attentive to the information being displayed. Conventional optical eye tracking devices detect where the user is looking, regardless of whether they are paying attention to what they are seeing. An early-stage prototype has proven the viability of this innovation. NASA seeks partners to continue development and commercialization.
Sensor
Portable Medical Diagnosis Instrument
The technology utilizes four cutting-edge sensor technologies to enable minimally- or non-invasive analysis of various biological samples, including saliva, breath, and blood. The combination of technologies and sample pathways have unique advantages that collectively provides a powerful analytical capability. The four key technology components include the following: (1) the carbon nanotube (CNT) array designed for the detection of volatile molecules in exhaled breath; (2) a breath condenser surface to isolate nonvolatile breath compounds in exhaled breath; (3) the miniaturized differential mobility spectrometer (DMS) -like device for the detection of volatile and non-volatile molecules in condensed breath and saliva; and (4) the miniaturized circular disk (CD)-based centrifugal microfluidics device that can detect analytes in any liquid sample as well as perform blood cell counts. As an integrated system, the device has two ports for sample entry a mouthpiece for sampling of breath and a port for CD insertion. The breath analysis pathway consists of a CNT array followed by a condenser surface separating liquid and gas phase breath. The exhaled breath condensate is then analyzed via a DMS-like device and the separated gas breath can be analyzed by both CNT sensor array again and by DMS detectors.
Diagram showing the mounting of the transducer.
Non-invasive Intracranial Pressure Measurement
This technology and a product based on it offer new analytical capabilities for assessment of intracranial dynamics. It offers the possibility for the monitoring of transcranial expansion and related physiological phenomena in humans resulting from variations in intracranial pressure (ICP) caused by injuries to the head and/or brain pathologies. The technology uses constant frequency pulse phase-locked loop (CFPPLL) technology to measure skull expansion caused by pressure and its variations in time. This approach yields a more accurate, more robust measurement capability with improved bandwidth that allows new analytical approaches for assessing the physiology of skull expansion under pulsatile cerebral blood flow. The dynamical quantities assessable with the CFPPLL include skull volume expansion and total fluid. Such an instrument can serve to measure intracranial dynamics with equation based algorithms, and offers a path to measure or determine quasistatic intracranial pressure, along with the pulsatile related intracranial pressure increments. Supportive measurements, such as time dependence of arterial pressure waveforms together with time dependent phase change of transcranial expansions can serve as the basis of noninvasive techniques to measure intracranial pressure.
NASA Helios Solar Powered Aircraft
Flexible Body Control Using Fiber Optic Sensors (FlexFOS)
Aerospace vehicles experience flexible dynamics that have adverse effects on guidance, navigation, and control. Vehicles that include automated control are further affected by flexible modes and structural vibrations. Flexible dynamics become even more critical as demand for larger and more fuel efficient vehicles increases. Using fiber optic technology to collect both flexible and rigid body information enables increased knowledge (data) of the state of a vehicle, a more robust collection method against weather conditions, and a more cost-effective measurement method. This technology could potentially be applied to aerospace vehicles as well as commercial space structures, commercial aerospace structures, cranes, buildings, or bridges - anything with a large cross sectional ratio. The RSS is the key to developing a sensor which provides flexible body kinematics. A reference structure must be chosen that minimizes weight impacts while retaining structural integrity. The reference structure material must also be very predictable and repeatable. Once this geometry has been optimized, analyzed, and mapped it is integrated with strain sensors making it a Reference Strain Structure. The RSS must then be integrated into an adaptive structure, which both protects and provides a connection to the desired structure to be measured. The RSS combined with the properly designed algorithms provides the capability and portability to be installed on any of the aforementioned structures alleviating unique engineering and calibration required for each structure or vehicle. It also provides the capability to employ actuators to counteract the effects of structural vibrations. FlexFOS provides a simple, portable solution adaptable to any structure.
Spatial Standard Observer (SSO)
Spatial Standard Observer (SSO)
The Spatial Standard Observer (SSO) provides a tool that allows measurement of the visibility of an element, or visual discriminability of two elements. The device may be used whenever it is necessary to measure or specify visibility or visual intensity. The SSO is based on a model of human vision, and has been calibrated by an extensive set of human test data. The SSO operates on a digital image or a pair of digital images. It computes a numerical measure of the perceptual strength of the single image, or of the visible difference between the two images. The visibility measurements are provided in units of Just Noticeable Differences (JND), a standard measure of perceptual intensity. A target that is just visible has a measure of 1 JND. The SSO will be useful in a wide variety of applications, most notably in the inspection of displays during the manufacturing process. It is also useful in for evaluating vision from unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAV) predicting visibility of UAVs from other aircraft, from the control tower of aircraft on runways, measuring visibility of damage to aircraft and to the shuttle orbiter, evaluation of legibility of text, icons or symbols in a graphical user interface, specification of camera and display resolution, inspection of displays during the manufacturing process, estimation of the quality of compressed digital video, and predicting outcomes of corrective laser eye surgery.
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