Auxiliary Diagnosis of Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Using Eye-Tracking and Digital Biomarkers: Case-Control Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder in school-aged children. The lack of objective biomarkers for ADHD often results in missed diagnoses or misdiagnoses, which lead to inappropriate or delayed interventions. Eye-tracking technology provides an objective method to assess children's neuropsychological behavior. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to develop an objective and reliable auxiliary diagnostic system for ADHD using eye-tracking technology. This system would be valuable for screening for ADHD in schools and communities and may help identify objective biomarkers for the clinical diagnosis of ADHD. METHODS: We conducted a case-control study of children with ADHD and typically developing (TD) children. We designed an eye-tracking assessment paradigm based on the core cognitive deficits of ADHD and extracted various digital biomarkers that represented participant behaviors. These biomarkers and developmental patterns were compared between the ADHD and TD groups. Machine learning (ML) was implemented to validate the ability of the extracted eye-tracking biomarkers to predict ADHD. The performance of the ML models was evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. RESULTS: We recruited 216 participants, of whom 94 (43.5%) were children with ADHD and 122 (56.5%) were TD children. The ADHD group showed significantly poorer performance (for accuracy and completion time) than the TD group in the prosaccade, antisaccade, and delayed saccade tasks. In addition, there were substantial group differences in digital biomarkers, such as pupil diameter fluctuation, regularity of gaze trajectory, and fixations on unrelated areas. Although the accuracy and task completion speed of the ADHD group increased over time, their eye-movement patterns remained irregular. The TD group with children aged 5 to 6 years outperformed the ADHD group with children aged 9 to 10 years, and this difference remained relatively stable over time, which indicated that the ADHD group followed a unique developmental pattern. The ML model was effective in discriminating the groups, achieving an area under the curve of 0.965 and an accuracy of 0.908. CONCLUSIONS: The eye-tracking biomarkers proposed in this study effectively identified differences in various aspects of eye-movement patterns between the ADHD and TD groups. In addition, the ML model constructed using these digital biomarkers achieved high accuracy and reliability in identifying ADHD. Our system can facilitate early screening for ADHD in schools and communities and provide clinicians with objective biomarkers as a reference.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 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) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".