A parametric analysis of eye tremor movement during ocular fixation, applied to schizophrenia

In this study, we use a parametric autoregressive (AR) model to obtain descriptive features of eye tremor movement during fixation. The interest consists in analyzing model parameters to determine the information that can be used as indicator of specific pathophysiology underlying cerebral dysfunction in schizophrenic subjects. We have tested healthy volunteers and schizophrenic medicated and unmedicated patients, to evaluate the treatment effect. The AR model is applied to the eye tremor movement extracted from the eye position signal recorded when subjects are fixating a stationary target. The analysis of the model parameters show distinct classes, corresponding to a population of subjects among the three kind included in this study.