This poster presents a new method to improve accuracy in pupillometry, showcasing exciting advancements in pupillometry. It introduces more precise techniques for measuring pupil size and movement, which could significantly enhance the reliability of studies on vision, brain activity, and neurological assessments
What is pupillometry?
Pupillometry studies how the pupil, located at the center of the iris, changes in size and position. The pupil controls the amount of light entering the eye by contracting or dilating, adjusting for different lighting conditions. These changes are essential for protecting the retina and maintaining optimal vision.
What Can Our Pupils Reveal?
Pupillometry is widely used in medical diagnostics, particularly in neurology. It provides valuable insights into the brain’s condition, often used to assess patients with traumatic brain injuries, strokes, and other neurological disorders. In patients with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s (PD), abnormal pupillary responses can signal early signs of cognitive decline or motor dysfunction.
Challenges in Pupillometry
Current pupillometry devices can be inaccurate. They often measure pupil size in pixels, which can change with lighting or eye movement, leading to unreliable data. These limitations can affect the precision of neurological assessments.
A New Method in Pupillometry for a More Accurate Measurements
The poster introduces a breakthrough approach. Instead of measuring pupil size in pixels, researchers compare it to the size of the limbus—the border of the iris. This creates a normalized measurement that remains consistent regardless of eye position or distance from the camera, resulting in more accurate data.
Recording oculomotor task
Eye movements were recorded using neuroClues and the borders of the pupil and limbus were manually marked. Specialized methods were applied to analyze this data, improving measurement precision.
Findings
By comparing pupil size to the limbus, the measurements stay much more stable, even if the eyes are moving in different directions. This helps avoid mistakes in tracking how big the pupil is.
Normally, the size and position of the pupil can change depending on where you’re looking or how big your pupil gets. But when we use the limbus as a reference, it removes these effects, making the measurements more reliable.
In actual recordings, even when the pupil and the eye edge changed a bit with eye movements, the size of the pupil (compared to the limbus) stayed more constant. This proves that the new method works better in real-world scenarios.
What could this mean for patients?
The implementation of this new method to improve accuracy in pupillometry holds the potential to reduce measurement errors and improve the quality of neurological assessments
Next steps
Our ambition is to bring the wealth of neuroscientific knowledge from the lab to the clinic.
These new measurements will soon be implemented in the neuroClues solution.
Stay tuned!
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