Detection of Saccades and Quick-Phases in Eye Movement Recordings with Nystagmus

Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV) is the most common cause of vertigo and dizziness. Patients with those symptoms can be diagnosed by the presence of a specific pattern of nystagmus during the Dix-Hallpike maneuver. However, almost half of dizzy patients visiting Emergency Department (ED) are misdiagnosed, leading to significant morbidity and high medical costs. This can be attributed to the lack of specialized expertise of front-line physicians and to the lack of validated automatic commercial devices and software for nystagmus detection and quantification. Here we aim to enhance saccade detection thereby improving automatic nystagmus quantification. The proposed method is evaluated on a nystagmus dataset recorded from patients in the ED as they undergo the Dix-Hallpike maneuver. Additionally, the proposed method is also tested on a publicly available saccade dataset and compared with state-of-the-art eye movement detection methods.