Depth-induced Saliency Comparison Network for Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease via Jointly Analysis of Visual Stimuli and Eye Movements

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is very important for following medical treatments, and eye movements under special visual stimuli may serve as a potential non-invasive biomarker for detecting cognitive abnormalities of AD patients. In this paper, we propose an Depth-induced saliency comparison network (DISCN) for eye movement analysis, which may be used for diagnosis the Alzheimers disease. In DISCN, a salient attention module fuses normal eye movements with RGB and depth maps of visual stimuli using hierarchical salient attention (SAA) to evaluate comprehensive saliency maps, which contain information from both visual stimuli and normal eye movement behaviors. In addition, we introduce serial attention module (SEA) to emphasis the most abnormal eye movement behaviors to reduce personal bias for a more robust result. According to our experiments, the DISCN achieves consistent validity in classifying the eye movements between the AD patients and normal controls.

Deep Learning-based Eye-Tracking Analysis for Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease Using 3D Comprehensive Visual Stimuli

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) causes a continuous decline in memory, thinking, and judgment. Traditional diagnoses are usually based on clinical experience, which is limited by some realistic factors. In this paper, we focus on exploiting deep learning techniques to diagnose AD based on eye-tracking behaviors. Visual attention, as typical eye-tracking behavior, is of great clinical value to detect cognitive abnormalities in AD patients. To better analyze the differences in visual attention between AD patients and normals, we first conduct a 3D comprehensive visual task on a non-invasive eye-tracking system to collect visual attention heatmaps. We then propose a multi-layered comparison convolution neural network (MC-CNN) to distinguish the visual attention differences between AD patients and normals. In MC-CNN, the multi-layered representations of heatmaps are obtained by hierarchical convolution to better encode eye-movement behaviors, which are further integrated into a distance vector to benefit the comprehensive visual task. Extensive experimental results on the collected dataset demonstrate that MC-CNN achieves consistent validity in classifying AD patients and normals with eye-tracking data.