Test-Retest-Reliability of Video-Oculography During Free Visual Exploration in Right-Hemispheric Stroke Patients With Neglect

Abstract

The Mean gaze position during free visual exploration (FVE) is a sensitive tool to detect neglect in patients after a right-hemispheric stroke. Here we investigated the test-retestreliability of mean gaze position during FVE in 23 patients with left-sided neglect after a first-ever sub-acute right-hemispheric stroke. We analyzed the reliability between different test sets administered within 11 days (test sets A and B, each including different images and their mirrored versions), and between repeated measures using the same test set administered three times within 2 days (test set C, including the same images and their mirrored versions). The intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) showed good reliability between the two different test sets (test sets A and B; ICC = 0.819), and excellent reliability for the repeated measures with the same test set C (ICC = 0.964). FVE can therefore be recommended for the longitudinal assessments of patients' neglect severity during neurorehabilitation as well as in treatment trials.

The attention atlas virtual reality platform maps three-dimensional (3D) attention in unilateral spatial neglect patients: a protocol

“…Unilateral spatial neglect is a lateralised attention disorder characterised by the failure to orient to, attend to, respond to, or report stimuli appearing on the contralesional hemispace (Buxbaum et al, 2004; Vuilleumier, 2013), despite having intact sensory abilities (Howard & Rowe, 2018). It is commonplace, long-lasting, but highly variable following stroke (Kaufmann, Cazzoli, Muri, Nef, & Nyffeler, 2020a; Kaufmann et al, 2020b; Harvey, Learmonth, Rossit, & Chen, 2021; Ringman, Saver, Woolson, Clarke, & Adams, 2004) and results in long-term major disability (Checketts et al, 2020; Conti & Amone, 2016; Wee & Hopman, 2008). Lateralised frontoparietal neuroanatomical networks, especially in the right hemisphere, are strongly implicated in the pathology (He et al, 2007; Pedrazzini & Ptak, 2020; Wu et al, 2016).…”

Gaze-contingent display technology can help to reduce the ipsilesional attention bias in hemispatial neglect following stroke

“…To assess the effectivity of our modifications, we measured (i) the median horizontal position of all fixations in the scene (CoF) as a marker of the egocentric spatial attention bias, (ii) the direction of first orienting (percentage of first saccades going leftward) as a marker of the very early (“pre-attentive”) spatial bias and (iii) the performance when searching for targets in a visual scene (omission rate and RT) as an indicator of the functional impairment during an everyday activity. We used highly accurate eye tracking and fast algorithms to successfully implement the GCD modification and to directly measure the effects during two different visuo-motor tasks (FV and VS), which are known to have high sensitivity and high test–retest reliability in the assessment of spatial neglect [ 20 , 23 , 41 , 42 ]. A group of healthy subjects constituted the control to prove if a normalization of the patients’ exploration behavior was achieved and to ensure that any findings in the patients were not merely due to the basic composition of the stimulus images.…”

“…Both tasks combined with eye movement recordings were previously shown to be feasible and reliable tools for diagnosing hemispatial neglect in stroke patients [ 20 , 23 , 41 ]. Kaufmann et al [ 42 ] could further show a very good test–retest reliability and recommended the paradigm for treatment trials with repeated measurements. In the current study, we accordingly used eye movement recordings during FV and VS to not only induce gaze-dependent saliency modifications but also to ‘read out’ overt attentional shifts in order to assess the impact of the modifications on the visual exploration behavior of neglect patients.…”

Visual Neglect after PICA Stroke—A Case Study

“…Additionally, video-oculography during a free visual exploration paradigm (FVE) was performed in order to measure the spatial deployment of visual attention, as reflected by the horizontal distribution of visual fixations and early attentional orientation, i.e., the direction of the first saccade [ 17 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ]. In brief, 12 naturalistic images (i.e., color photographs of everyday scenes; size 1200 × 900 pixels) and their mirrored versions (mirrored along the vertical axis) were shown on a computer screen.…”

“…During video-oculography, the participants were seated in front of the screen, and the head was positioned on a chin-and-forehead rest, to ensure that their mid-sagittal plane was aligned with the middle of the screen at a constant distance of 68 cm (resulting in a viewing angle of 28° × 21°) and to minimize head movements. Eye movements were recorded using a remote, infrared-based, video-eye-tracking system (EyeLink 1000 Plus System, SR Research, Ottawa, ON, Canada) [ 25 ].…”