Feature extraction with self-supervised learning on eye-tracking data from Parkinson’s patients and healthy individuals

Sammanfattning: Eye-tracking is a method for monitoring and measuring eye movements. The technology has had a significant impact so far and new application areas are emerging. Today, the technology is used in the gaming industry, health industry, self-driving cars, and not least in medicine. In the latter, large research resources are invested to investigate the extent to which eye-tracking can help with disease diagnostics. One disease of interest is Parkinson’s disease, a neuro-degenerative disease in which the dopamine production in nerve cells is destroyed. This leads to detoriating nerve signal transmission, which in turn affects the motor skills. One of the affected motor functions associated with PD is the oculomotor function, affecting the eye function. The declination can be observed clinically by physicians, however eye-tracking technology has a high potential here, but it remains to investigate which methodology and which test protocols are relevant to study and to what extent the technology can be used as a diagnostic tool. A novel class of algorithms for finding representations of data is called self-supervised learning (SSL). The class of algorithms seems to have a high potential in terms of categorizing biomarkers. This thesis examines to which extent an SSL network can learn representations of eye-tracking data on Parkinson’s patients, in order to distinguish between healthy and sick, patients on and off medication. The result suggests that the network does not succeed in learning distinct differences between groups. Furthermore, no difference is observed in the result when we in the model take into account the task-specific target information that the subjects are following. Today in the UK approximately 26 percent of Parkinson’s patients are misdiagnosed. In the initial state of the disease, the misdiagnosis is even higher. Potentially, the method can be used as a complement to regular diagnosis in different stages of the disease. This would provide better conditions for the patient as well as for medical and pharmaceutical research. The method also has the potential to reduce physicians’ workload.