SportCon

Despite increasing media attention and awareness, there is still no objective diagnostic for concussion. This lack of objective measure makes recognition and treatment difficult, affecting recovery for athletes and hapless victims of trauma. A major technology that we have developed for classification of brain injury is an automated eye tracking algorithm performed while someone watches a short film clip or video. The underlying premise of this technology is that normal healthy people have eye movements that are tightly synchronized while those with neurologic injury have impairments traceable to the pathway in the brain responsible for that particular movement. The technique consists of having a subject using a chin and forehead rest view a monitor on which a short film clip plays continuously inside an aperture that moves around the perimeter of the screen. The pupils are tracked over 220 seconds of time for comparison to each other and to a database of control subjects. We have demonstrated that eye tracking abnormalities correlate with severity of concussion and other brain injuries, as well as other neurophysiologic aspects of brain injury. Challenges in data interpretation arise from comorbidities and environmental impacts and the ultimate impact of this technology remains to be fully realized.