Department of Neuropsychiatry, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Department of Psychiatry, Seoul National University College of Medicine, 101 Daehak-no, Chongno-gu, Seoul, 03080, Republic of Korea.
Sci Rep. 2021 Sep 15;11(1):18402. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-97885-1.
The symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are largely related to impaired executive functioning due to frontostriatal dysfunction. To better treat OCD, the development of biomarkers to bridge the gap between the symptomatic-cognitive phenotype and brain abnormalities is warranted. Therefore, we aimed to identify biomarkers of impaired organizational strategies during visual encoding processes in OCD patients by developing an eye tracking-based Rey-Osterrieth complex figure test (RCFT). In 104 OCD patients and 114 healthy controls (HCs), eye movements were recorded during memorization of the RCFT figure, and organizational scores were evaluated. Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) scores were calculated to evaluate the distance between a participant's eye gaze distribution and a hypothetical uniform distribution within the RCFT figure. Narrower gaze distributions within the RCFT figure, which yielded higher KLD scores, indicated that the participant was more obsessed with detail and had less organizational strategy. The OCD patients showed lower organizational scores than the HCs. Although no group differences in KLD scores were noted, KLD scores were significantly associated with organization T scores in the OCD group. The current study findings suggest that eye tracking biomarkers of visual memory encoding provide a rapidly determined index of executive functioning, such as organizational strategies, in OCD patients.
强迫症（OCD）的症状在很大程度上与额叶-纹状体功能障碍导致的执行功能障碍有关。为了更好地治疗 OCD，有必要开发生物标志物来弥合症状-认知表型与大脑异常之间的差距。因此，我们旨在通过开发基于眼动追踪的 Rey-Osterrieth 复杂图形测试（RCFT），来确定 OCD 患者在视觉编码过程中组织策略受损的生物标志物。在 104 名 OCD 患者和 114 名健康对照者（HCs）中，记录了他们在 RCFT 图形记忆过程中的眼动，并评估了组织分数。Kullback-Leibler 发散（KLD）分数用于评估参与者的注视分布与 RCFT 图形内假设均匀分布之间的距离。RCFT 图形内更狭窄的注视分布会产生更高的 KLD 分数，这表明参与者更加关注细节，组织策略较少。OCD 患者的组织分数低于 HCs。尽管在 KLD 分数上没有发现组间差异，但 KLD 分数与 OCD 组的组织 T 分数显著相关。本研究结果表明，视觉记忆编码的眼动生物标志物为 OCD 患者的执行功能（如组织策略）提供了一个快速确定的指标。
