The eyes are not only a window to the soul; Tracking saccades can help doctors detect a range of brain health problems. That’s why French-Belgian medical technology startup neuroClues is developing accessible, high-speed eye tracking technology that incorporates AI-based analysis. He wants to make it easier for healthcare providers to use eye tracking to support the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.
The company is starting with a focus on Parkinson’s disease, which already typically incorporates a test of a patient’s eye movements. Today, a doctor asks a patient to “follow my finger,” but neuroClues wants clinicians to use its proprietary wearable headsets to capture eye movements at 800 frames per second, after which they can analyze the data in just minutes . seconds.
The company’s 3.5-year-old co-founders – two of whom are neuroscience researchers – point to Parkinson’s disease’s high misdiagnosis rates as one of the factors behind their decision to focus first on the disease. But their ambitions extend more widely. They paint a picture of the future in which their device will become a “stethoscope for the brain”. Imagine, for example, if your annual visit to the optician could include a quick brain health scan and compare you to standard benchmarks for your age. According to the startup, which says it wants to help 10 million patients by 2023, eye tracking protocols could also help test for other diseases and conditions, including concussions, Alzheimer’s, MS and accidents. cerebral vascular.
So how does the device work? Today, a patient looks through the headset and sees a screen with dots appearing on it. A clinician then tells them to track the dots with their eyes, after which the device extracts data that can be used as disease biomarkers by recording and analyzing their eye movements, measuring things like latency and rate of ‘error. It also provides the clinician a standard value expected of a healthy population to compare with the patient’s results.
“The first scientific paper using eye tracking to diagnose patients was in 1905,” neuroClues co-founder and CEO Antoine Pouppez told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview, noting that the technique was initially used to diagnose schizophrenia. In the 1960s, when video eye trackers arrived, research into the tracking technique boomed. neurological disorders. But decades of research into the usefulness of eye tracking as a diagnostic technique did not translate into widespread clinical adoption because the technology did not yet exist and/or was too expensive, Pouppez said.
“That’s where this technology comes from: my co-founders’ frustration that eye tracking has a lot of value – it’s been demonstrated in research that has been clinically proven in thousands of patients in research settings – and it is still not used in clinical practice research settings,” he said. “Today’s doctors use their fingers – and literally say ‘follow my finger’ – while an eye moves at 600 degrees per second. You make three eye movements per second. This makes it very, very difficult, if not impossible, to assess how far you are moving (by the human eye alone).
Others have also spotted the potential to do more with eye tracking as a diagnostic aid.
US company Neurosync, for example, offers a VR headset combined with FDA-approved eye tracking software that it says can analyze the user’s eye movements “to aid in the diagnosis of concussions”. The product is intended for football players and athletes of other contact sports. who are at high risk of head injury.
There are also mobile app makers, such as BrainEye, that offer consumers smartphone-based eye tracking technology to self-assess “brain health.” (These claims are not evaluated by medical device regulators.)
But neuroClues stands out in many ways. First, he claims his headset can be placed in a regular clinician’s office, without the need for a darkroom or specialized hardware. This is not about using commercially available hardware, but rather about developing dedicated eye tracking headsets for eye testing, designed to record at high speed and control the recording environment. The company’s founders further claim that by creating its own software, neuroClues benefits Unmatched speed of data capture in a commercially deployed, non-static device.
To protect these apparent advantages, neuroClues has granted (or filed) a number of patents that it says cover various aspects of the design, such as hardware and software synchronization, and its approach to data analysis. The startup is also in the process of filing for FDA approval and hopes to gain approval for use of its device, a clinical support tool, in the United States later this year. It is working on the same type of application in the European Union and plans to obtain regulatory approval in the EU in 2025.
“We are the only ones on the market today to record 800 frames per second on a handheld device,” Pouppez said, emphasizing that the “gold standard” for research is 1,000 frames per second. “No clinical or non-clinical product does this at this frame rate, which means we had to raise barriers that no one had raised before.”
Image credit: neuroClues
neuroClues, incubated at the Paris Brain Institute, plans that the first eye tracking headsets will be deployed in specialized settings such as university hospitals, therefore for use on patients already referred to consultants. He notes that the service will be reimbursable through current health insurance codes, as eye tracking tests are an established medical procedure. The company says it is also in discussions with a number of other companies in the United States and Europe interested in its hardware and software.
This first version of the device is intended as a diagnostic aid, meaning a human clinician remains responsible for interpreting the results. But Pouppez said the team’s goal is to evolve the technology to also be used to interpret data, so the device can be deployed more widely.
“Our goal is to move down quickly to bring these diagnostic capabilities to practitioners,” he told us. “We hope to be on the market with such a device in 2026/27. And thus broaden our market outlook and actually be in (the toolbox of) every neurologist in the United States and Europe.
The startup announces the closing of a €5 million pre-Series A funding round, led by the White Fund and the European Commission’s EIC Accelerator program. Existing investors Invest.BW, as well as a number of business angels, including Fiona du Monceau, former chair of the board of directors of UCB, Artwall, and Olivier Legrain, CEO of IBA, also participated. Including this round, neuroClues has raised a total of 12 million euros since its creation in 2020.
Pouppez said he would look to launch a Series A in the next 12 to 18 months. “Our existing investors and the European Commission have already expressed interest in participating, so I am essentially looking for a lead investor,” he added.
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