Researchers developed a technology that can reveal the impact of brain injury by assessing patients' eye movements as they watch a music video for less than four minutes.
The findings suggest eye-tracking technology could help monitor the recovery of patients who have suffered brain injuries, NYU Langone Medical Center reported.
To make their findings the researchers looked at 169 veterans, 157 of whom were healthy and 12 who suffered from nerve weakness in the eyes or brain swelling around those nerves. The nerves in question affected the eyes' ability to move up and down. The team used technology that allowed researchers to measure the ratio of horizontal and vertical eye movements. These ratios were about one-to-one in healthy patients, but those with nerve damage or swelling the brain showed abnormal eye movement ratios.
"We are very excited about the findings because it offers a proof of concept that this technology can detect brain injury and suggest its location," said Dr. Uzma Samadani, chief of neurosurgery at New York Harbor Health Care System and co-director of the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center for the Study of Post-Traumatic Stress and Traumatic Brain Injury at NYU Langone. "One of the reasons that clinical trials for treatment of brain injury have failed in the past is that brain injury is hard to classify and quantitate with existing technologies. This invention suggests a potential new method for classifying and quantitating the extent of injury. Once validated, it will both accelerate diagnosis and aid in the development of better treatments."
The test could easily be applied to hundreds of patients in a relatively short period of time. Brain injury is the number one cause of death and disability in Americans under the age of 35, and these new findings could help keep track of the devastating injuries which can be hard to assess with current imaging techniques.
"When a person falls and hits their head, it can be difficult to determine whether the injury is life-threatening," Samadani said. "Eye tracking is potentially a simple, non-invasive and cost-effective way to determine quickly which patients need immediate attention."
The finding was published in a recent edition of the Journal of Neurosurgery.
