Automated Analysis of Drawing Process to Estimate Global Cognition in Older Adults: Preliminary International Validation on the US and Japan Data Sets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background With the aging of populations worldwide, early detection of cognitive impairments has become a research and clinical priority, particularly to enable preventive intervention for dementia. Automated analysis of the drawing process has been studied as a promising means for lightweight, self-administered cognitive assessment. However, this approach has not been sufficiently tested for its applicability across populations. Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the applicability of automated analysis of the drawing process for estimating global cognition in community-dwelling older adults across populations in different nations. Methods We collected drawing data with a digital tablet, along with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) scores for assessment of global cognition, from 92 community-dwelling older adults in the United States and Japan. We automatically extracted 6 drawing features that characterize the drawing process in terms of the drawing speed, pauses between drawings, pen pressure, and pen inclinations. We then investigated the association between the drawing features and MoCA scores through correlation and machine learning–based regression analyses. Results We found that, with low MoCA scores, there tended to be higher variability in the drawing speed, a higher pause:drawing duration ratio, and lower variability in the pen’s horizontal inclination in both the US and Japan data sets. A machine learning model that used drawing features to estimate MoCA scores demonstrated its capability to generalize from the US dataset to the Japan dataset (R2=0.35; permutation test, P<.001). Conclusions This study presents initial empirical evidence of the capability of automated analysis of the drawing process as an estimator of global cognition that is applicable across populations. Our results suggest that such automated analysis may enable the development of a practical tool for international use in self-administered, automated cognitive assessment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".