Geometry of navigation identifies genetic-risk and clinical Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Recent research evidence demonstrates that the inability to orient oneself and navigate space is an early indicator of Alzheimer’s Disease. The video game Sea Hero Quest (SHQ) was designed to assess the players’ navigation ability, and several research works analysed the SHQ data using simple metrics such as length and time of navigation paths. Expanding these analyses, we propose new performance metrics that capture the geometry of paths, and analyse datasets of more than 60,000 navigators. The metrics identify players who failed the navigation task, the dementia patients, and carriers of the at-risk allele of the Apolipoprotein-E [APOE]. Furthermore the metrics detect weak navigation ability when only a fraction of navigation paths are used, with superior performance to baseline methods. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed performance metrics pave the way to a comprehensive pre-clinical screening toolbox for Alzheimer’s Disease.TEASERWe propose geometric methods to capture decline in navigation ability from dementia.