Artificial Intelligence-Based Classification of Parkinson’s Disease Using Virtual Reality-Derived Oculometrics
European Neuro-Ophthalmology Society (EUNOS) Meeting, 2026
Study details
Introduction
Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis remains largely based on clinical evaluation, creating a need for objective and quantifiable biomarkers to enhance diagnostic accuracy, enable earlier detection, and support longitudinal monitoring. Eye movement and pupillary abnormalities are increasingly recognized as sensitive indicators of PD-related dysfunction in ocular motor control pathways. Advances in virtual reality (VR)–based eye tracking allow standardized measurement of such parameters (“oculometrics”) and provide promising inputs for artificial intelligence (AI)–driven classification models. This study aimed to develop and evaluate machine learning approaches for distinguishing PD from healthy individuals using quantitative ocular motor and pupillary metrics acquired with a VR-based medical eye-tracking device.
Methods
Individuals with idiopathic PD were recruited at two clinical centres: Zurich (Switzerland) and Exeter (United Kingdom). Participants completed two study visits including standardized VR-based ocular motor testing alongside routine clinical examinations. Recordings with poor tracking quality or excessive signal loss were excluded. The analysis included 132 PD examinations and 148 examinations from an independent healthy control dataset. Each PD case was matched to an age- and sex-matched control using a globally optimal matching algorithm. Group differences were quantified using standardized mean differences (SMDs) and Welch’s t-tests. A supervised machine learning classifier was trained using the most discriminative oculometric features to distinguish PD from controls. Model performance was assessed separately for each site.
Results
The strongest PD–control differences were observed in fixation instability, ocular alignment, blink rate, saccadic measures (accuracy, peak velocity, and main sequence relationships), and pupillary dynamics including constriction/dilation velocity and response latency. The classifier demonstrated high diagnostic discrimination across both sites, with combined AUROC of 0.94.
Discussion
These preliminary findings suggest that VR-derived oculometrics provide robust biomarkers capable of differentiating individuals with PD from healthy controls. AI-based analysis of ocular motor and pupillary features may offer a scalable and objective tool to complement clinical assessment. Future work will focus on expanding cohorts, integrating datasets across centres, and correlating oculometric parameters with clinical disease measures to further improve diagnostic performance.



