BTT-SCAN: automated scoring of the Baking Tray Task for Unilateral Spatial Neglect assessment. Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN) often occurs after right ...
BTT-SCAN: automated scoring of the Baking Tray Task for Unilateral Spatial Neglect assessment Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN) often occurs after right hemispheric strokes, and affects the patient’s ability to explore the left hemispace. Patients have impaired awareness of stimuli in the neglected hemispace. There are several tests to assess USN (Azouvi et al., 2006), usually performed on paper sheets (e.g., target cancellation, line bisection). However, some patients “learn” to perform these tests, to the extent that they achieve “normal” levels of performance while maintaining clinical signs of neglect in everyday life. Other tests are closer to daily life activities. For example, the Baking Tray Task (BTT) requests to participants the disposition of 16 small cubes on a surface, “as if they were buns on a baking tray” (Tham, 1996). BTT proved itself a sensitive and reliable test for screening purposes and longitudinal studies; its results are little influenced by practice. The scoring of the BTT is usually laborious; for example, the results are transferred on A4 paper sheets, and performance is evaluated clinically. Here, we proposed BTT-SCAN, which automatizes the scoring of BTT, after having acquired the data through an artificial vision system: the cubes are automatically detected by a camera recognizing patterns through ArUco Markers (Garrido-Jurado et al., 2014). The system can thus produce instantaneously and automatically several indexes of patients’ performance. Future Directions BTT-SCAN could be useful for the development of diagnostic and rehabilitation programs in digital environments. Moreover, we are now implementing further BTT indexes based on Machine Learning algorithms and on the temporal order of the cubes selected by participants during the execution of the BTT. Additionally, we aim to collect a large dataset useful to delineate normative indicators and develop an Expert System (implementing Artificial Intelligence modules) able to analyse different BTT patterns. In this manner, our tool could help clinicians for diagnosis, discriminating between the absence/presence of USN and informing them on the possible presence of other, nonlateralized visuospatial impairments.
References Azouvi, P., Bartolomeo, P., Beis, J.-M., Perennou, D., Pradat-Diehl, P., & Rousseaux, M. (2006). A battery of tests for the quantitative assessment of unilateral neglect. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 24 (4-6), 273-285. Garrido-Jurado, S., Muñoz-Salinas, R., Madrid-Cuevas, F.J., Marín-Jiménez, M. J. (2014). Automatic generation and detection of highly reliable fiducial markers under occlusion. Pattern Recognition, 47 (6), 2280-2292. Tham K.v(1996). The Baking Tray Task: A Test of Spatial Neglect. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation: An International Journal, 6:1, 19-26.
