Eye Tracking Useful in TBI Treatment

Many patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) also suffer from negatively altered motor functions and communication behaviors, according to lead author Lorene Leung. The study will be presented in a poster session on Apr. 18 at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Washington, DC.

Since TBI is often accompanied by other side effects, and therefore can cause misdiagnoses, Leung and colleagues used gaze monitoring to examine eye tracking responses.

The team gathered 3 males who were diagnosed with being in a post-traumatic confusional state. Recruited from an acute rehabilitation hospital, the patients had their eye movements recorded with a visual cognition fMRI study.

The non-verbal, motor-free approach aimed to find the most reliable way of judging eye gaze responses when it came to communication as well as following commands.

“Monitoring the longest period of eye gaze during stimulus presentation appears to be the most reliable way to determine eye gaze responses in patients with severe TBI,” the authors concluded.