Vision can predict dementia 12 years before diagnosis, study finds

sciencealert.com

39 points·walterbell··7 comments

Hm. When I read this, it sounds as if they first looked for Dementia and then looked at all the different parameters that preceded. That doesn’t feel like good science where you verify a hypothesis you have _before_ starting the experiment. That’s how the dead fish in the MRI reacted to images of people (https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...)

On its own, this is not definitive. This is how you generate the hypothesis for the next round of research that looks for the visual data and tries to follow it to see if it can be predictive or not.

Explorative studies are helpful, but as you say then need hypothesis testing in further research.

> That doesn’t feel like good science where you verify a hypothesis you have _before_ starting the experiment.

I'm pretty sure that's a requirement for starting research, to have a hypothesis.

> One of the bottlenecks may be access to eye-tracking technologies, which are expensive and require training to use and analyse. Until cheaper and easy-to-use eye trackers are available, using eye movements as a diagnostic tool for early-stage Alzheimer's is not possible outside the laboratory.

I wonder if something like the recent AR/VR headsets that do eye tracking would be good enough, or if they need something far better?

Maybe I am missing the point about the visual problems they are trying to detect but it seems like something as simple as video game performance might pick out the same problem? Something like the old aliens game where you have to track and dodge missiles.

HN story ranking for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/40107216/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com