Work

Eye tracking as a diagnostic tool in Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and related dementias: a systematic review

Year: 2025

Type: review

Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology begins years before symptoms emerge, making early detection essential. Eye tracking offers a rapid, non-invasive means of identifying early cognitive decline through oculomotor disturbances. This Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)- and Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome (PICO)-guided systematic review evaluated studies from PubMed, ACM Digital Library, and Google Scholar on eye tracking in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), AD, and related dementias. Seventy-one studies met the inclusion criteria. Antisaccade tasks consistently distinguished AD and MCI from healthy controls, with impaired accuracy, longer latencies, and reduced gain. Non-saccadic paradigms (e.g., visual search, free viewing) indicated diminished exploratory behavior in AD, with mixed findings in MCI. A major limitation was the lack of cohorts defined by current biological criteria, hindering clinical translation. In a subset, classical machine-learning (ML) models and deep neural networks reported accuracies of 0.72 to 0.97. Overall, antisaccade tasks show strong promise for early AD screening; future work should adopt biologically defined cohorts and scalable, accessible eye-tracking technologies. Highlights: Antisaccade tasks best distinguish AD and MCI from HCs.Visual search/free-view tasks showed diminished exploratory behavior in AD.Most studies lack biomarker-based AD criteria, creating a major research gap.

Source: Alzheimer s & Dementia Diagnosis Assessment & Disease Monitoring

DOI: 10.1002/dad2.70238

Authors: Gustavo Luis Verón, Gustavo Ezequiel Juantorena, Greta Keller, Lucía Crivelli, Juan Esteban Kamienkowski

Institutions: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Language: English

Topic: Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research

Subfield: Psychiatry and Mental health

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,540