Visual Scanning Behaviour in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterised by memory loss and is often accompanied by psychiatric disorders. Since there are difficulties administering standard cognitive and psychiatric tests to patients with AD, it is desirable to develop objective tests of such functions. Novel tests to assess memory loss and apathy in AD were developed. The tests are based on the analysis of visual scanning behaviour (VSB) when participants look at visual stimuli. Differences between the VSBs of patients and controls are used for the assessments. When compared to controls, patients with AD had significantly reduced differences between their VSBs on novel and previously shown images. This was used to assess memory loss and to accurately classify patients with AD from elderly controls. Also, apathetic patients with AD showed more uniform VSBs on images with different arousal. The results suggest that analysis of VSB can help to assess memory and psychiatric functions in AD.M.A.S.2017-06-14 00:00:0