Vision-Based Classification of Developmental Disorders Using Eye-Movements

This paper proposes a system for fine-grained classification of developmental disorders via measurements of individuals’ eye-movements using multi-modal visual data. While the system is engineered to solve a psychiatric problem, we believe the underlying principles and general methodology will be of interest not only to psychiatrists but to researchers and engineers in medical machine vision. The idea is to build features from different visual sources that capture information not contained in either modality. Using an eye-tracker and a camera in a setup involving two individuals speaking, we build temporal attention features that describe the semantic location that one person is focused on relative to the other person’s face. In our clinical context, these temporal attention features describe a patient’s gaze on finely discretized regions of an interviewing clinician’s face, and are used to classify their particular developmental disorder.