Tags:Artificial intelligence, Automated assessment and Mild cognitive impairment
Abstract:
Cognitive impairment is a growing public health concern, with early detection playing a crucial role in improving patient outcomes. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is widely used for screening mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early-stage dementia. However, traditional MoCA assessments require manual scoring by trained professionals, making the process labor-intensive, time-consuming, and susceptible to human error. To overcome these limitations, we propose an automated pipeline for MoCA score estimation using eye-gaze data and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach leverages gaze-tracking technology to capture spatial and temporal eye-movement patterns during structured cognitive tasks, identifying subtle cognitive impairments that may otherwise go unnoticed. The raw gaze data is preprocessed and mapped onto task-relevant image regions, where a pretrained ViT extracts high-dimensional feature representations. To address inconsistencies in gaze sampling and improve temporal modeling, we introduce a time-aware positional embedding mechanism that enhances the model’s ability to infer cognitive performance. These extracted features are then processed by a transformer-based classification model to predict MoCA scores with high accuracy. We validate our approach using a dataset collected from seven cognitive gaming sessions, demonstrating its effectiveness in automated cognitive assessment. The experimental results indicate that our method provides a reliable and efficient alternative to traditional MoCA evaluations, reducing dependency on human intervention while maintaining diagnostic accuracy.
Automated MoCA Score Estimation Using Eye-Gaze Data and Vision Transformers