![](bg1.png)
EOGSTUDIO
A Software Platform for Processing Electrooculography Recordings
R. A. Becerra-García
1
, R. V. García
1
, F. Rojas
2
, J. González
2
, B. San Román
2
and L. Velázquez
3
1
University of Holguín “Oscar Lucero Moya”, Holguín, Cuba
2
University of Granada, Granada, Spain
3
Center for the Research and Rehabilitation of Hereditary Ataxias, Holguín, Cuba
Keywords: Biomedical engineering, Medical applications, Electrooculography, Computational neuroscience, Computer
aided diagnosis.
Abstract: Analysis of saccadic eye movements is a fundamental task for the study of different neurological disorders.
The Center of Research and Rehabilitation of Hereditary Ataxias (CIRAH) located in Holguín, Cuba; uses
this technique in order to study the evolution of many different ataxias. Nevertheless, current available
software applications do not fill the requirements needed by the CIRAH’s staff to complete their processing
protocol, as they do not run in modern operating systems or are poorly usable. EogStudio was created with
the objective of filling the gap left by these applications. It is signal processing platform based on extensible
plugins that meet the requirements made by CIRAH’s researchers. For the processing and determination of
the significative points of the saccadic eye movements, soft computing techniques, such as independent
component analysis, were applied.
1 INTRODUCTION
The study of eye movements has been proved to be a
useful tool to diagnose and evaluate the patient
condition in many neurological disorders. In
particular, saccadic tests for clinical proposals are
usually applied in researches related to several
diseases, like ataxia, Parkinson, schizophrenia,
amongst many others (Jones and DeJong, 1971);
(Rivaud-Pechoux et al., 1998); (Schulze et al.,
2006).
Available embedded software in dedicated
equipment that records and analyzes eye
movements, behaves as a 'black box', since
manufacturers do not usually give information
related to the algorithms and mathematical methods
involved in the computing of variables concerning
the evaluation of the eye movements. Furthermore,
these systems in general terms lack of the necessary
extensibility, and very often the reports do not
accomplish the researchers’ requirements.
In this work, a software developed in the
University of Holguin, in Cuba, named EogStudio,
is described, together with its algorithms for saccade
detection and characterization.
All the experiments were carried out by the
medical staff of CIRAH. Each patient was placed in
a chair, with a head fixation device to avoid head
movements, the variables were collected by a two
channel electronystagmograph (Otoscreen, Jaeger-
Toennies, D-97204 Höchberg, Germany). Recording
conditions were set as follows: electrodes of silver
chloride placed in the external borders of right eye
(active electrode) and left eye (reference electrode),
high pass filtering 0.002 Hz, low pass filtering 20
Hz, sensitivity 200 µV/division, and sampling
frequency 200 Hz. For stimulus generation a black
screen CRT display showing a white circular target
with an angular size of 0.7º was used. The stimulus
and patient response data are automatically stored in
ASCII files by Otoscreen electronystagmograph.
This software reads the saccadic records from the
files generated by the electronystagmograph and
computes a set of significant variables, in order to
study neurological disorders. A main goal of the
developers of this software was the potential for
extension and upgrading adapting to researchers’
requirements. This goals was achieved through the
use of a plugin-based architecture model.
The software is intended for ataxia SCA-2
computer-aided diagnosis. SCA-2 is a disease that
347
A. Becerra-García R., V. García R., Rojas F., González J., San Román B. and Velázquez L..
EOGSTUDIO - A Software Platform for Processing Electrooculography Recordings.
DOI: 10.5220/0003678203470350
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Neural Computation Theory and Applications (NCTA-2011), pages 347-350
ISBN: 978-989-8425-84-3
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)