Gazefinder as a clinical supplementary tool for discriminating between autism spectrum disorder and typical development in male adolescents and adults.
BACKGROUND
Gaze abnormality is a diagnostic criterion for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, few easy-to-use clinical tools exist to evaluate the unique eye-gaze patterns of ASD. Recently, we developed Gazefinder, an all-in-one eye-tracking system for early detection of ASD in toddlers. Because abnormal gaze patterns have been documented in various ASD age groups, we predicted that Gazefinder might also detect gaze abnormality in adolescents and adults. In this study, we tested whether Gazefinder could identify unique gaze patterns in adolescents and adults with ASD.


METHODS
We measured the percentage of eye fixation time allocated to particular objects depicted in movies (i.e., eyes and mouth in human face movies, upright and inverted biological motion in movies that presented these stimuli simultaneously, and people and geometry in movies that presented these stimuli simultaneously) by male adolescents and adults with ASD (N = 26) and age-matched males with typical development (TD; N = 35). We compared these percentages between the two groups (ASD and TD) and with scores on the social responsiveness scale (SRS). Further, we conducted discriminant analyses to determine if fixation times allocated to particular objects could be used to discriminate between individuals with and without ASD.


RESULTS
Compared with the TD group, the ASD group showed significantly less fixation time at locations of salient social information (i.e., eyes in the movie of human faces without lip movement and people in the movie of people and geometry), while there were no significant groupwise differences in the responses to movies of human faces with lip movement or biological motion. In a within-group correlation analysis, a few of the fixation-time items correlated with SRS, although most of them did not. No items significantly correlated with SRS in both ASD and TD groups. The percentage fixation times to eyes and people, which exhibited large effect sizes for the group difference, could differentiate ASD and TD with a sensitivity of 81.0% and a specificity of 80.0%.


CONCLUSIONS
These findings suggest that Gazefinder is potentially a valuable and easy-to-use tool for objectively measuring unique gaze patterns and discriminating between ASD and TD in male adolescents and adults.
['Fujioka|Toru|T|', 'Inohara|Keisuke|K|', 'Okamoto|Yuko|Y|', 'Masuya|Yasuhiro|Y|', 'Ishitobi|Makoto|M|', 'Saito|Daisuke N|DN|', 'Jung|Minyoung|M|', 'Arai|Sumiyoshi|S|', 'Matsumura|Yukiko|Y|', 'Fujisawa|Takashi X|TX|', 'Narita|Kosuke|K|', 'Suzuki|Katsuaki|K|', 'Tsuchiya|Kenji J|KJ|', 'Mori|Norio|N|', 'Katayama|Taiichi|T|', 'Sato|Makoto|M|', 'Munesue|Toshio|T|', 'Okazawa|Hidehiko|H|', 'Tomoda|Akemi|A|', 'Wada|Yuji|Y|', 'Kosaka|Hirotaka|H|']
D000293:Adolescent D000328:Adult D019540:Area Under Curve D000067877:Autism Spectrum Disorder D016022:Case-Control Studies D016002:Discriminant Analysis D005403:Fixation, Ocular D006801:Humans D008297:Male D009799:Ocular Physiological Phenomena D010775:Photic Stimulation D011594:Psychometrics D012372:ROC Curve D012919:Social Behavior D013997:Time Factors
Autism spectrum disorder Adolescent Adult Gaze abnormality Eye-tracking Fixation Face Biological motion Geometry Discriminant analysis