A General End-to-End Method for Characterizing Neuropsychiatric Disorders using Free-Viewing Visual Scanning Tasks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The growing availability of eye-gaze tracking technology has allowed for its employment in a wide variety of applications, one of which is the objective diagnosis and monitoring of neuropsychiatric disorders from features of attentional bias extracted from visual scanning patterns. Current techniques in this field are largely comprised of non-generalizable methodologies that rely on domain expertise and study-specific assumptions. In this paper, we present a general, data-driven, end-to-end framework that extracts relevant features of attentional bias from visual scanning behaviour and uses these features to classify between subject groups with standard machine learning techniques. The general framework uses visual scanning data from free-viewing tasks. In these tasks, subjects look at sets of slides with several thematic images while their visual scanning patterns (sets of ordered fixations) are monitored by an eye-tracking system. Subjects' fixations are encoded into relative visual attention maps (RVAMs), and two data-driven methods are proposed to segment regions of interests (ROIs) from RVAMs: 1) using group average RVAMs, and 2) using differences of group average RVAMs. Relative fixation times within the segmented ROIs are then used as input features for a vanilla multilayered perceptron to classify between patient groups. The methods were evaluated on data from two studies: an anorexia nervosa (AN)/healthy controls study (AN study) with 37 subjects, and a bipolar disorder (BD)/major depressive disorder (MDD) study (BD-MDD study) with 73 subjects. Using leave-one-subject-out cross validation, the general methods achieved an area under the receiver operating curve (AUROC) score of 0.935 for the AN study and 0.888 for the BD-MDD study, the latter of which exceeds the performance of the state-of-the-art analysis model designed specifically for the BD-MDD study, which had an AUROC of 0.879. The results validate the proposed framework's efficacy as a generalizable, standard baseline for analyzing visual scanning data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".