Clinical Research Directory

Eye-Tracking FP "A Pilot Study of the Quantitative Evaluation of the Attention Paid to Faces With Facial Palsy by the Eye-tracking Technology.

The facial palsy concerns between 15 and 40 people per 100000 inhabitants. They are of various etiologies such as infectious, tumoral, traumatic or idiopathic. It has variable severities with sometimes heavy functional repercussions and different recovery potentials. The proposed palliative treatments are based on surgery, physiotherapy and botulinum toxin injections. However, when recovery is incomplete, acceptance is more difficult, with an impacted quality of life. In this context, patients' expectations and feelings about their care may become difficult for clinicians to apprehend. The eye-tracking is widely used in the marketing field, but it also finds medical applications including head and neck lesions and facial palsy in particular. Published studies focus on the gaze of photographs, excluding any notion of dynamics and by the analysis of the gaze of outside observers, ignoring the patient's gaze.The main objective is to evaluate the attention paid to the facial side with abnormal facial movement by patients with facial paralysis compared to healthy volunteers.

Social COgnition Screening

Social cognition refers to the mental processes involved in social interactions, including social perception, motivation, communication, emotion recognition, and theory of mind. Face perception plays a key role in children's social development, but children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) tend to look less at social stimuli, especially faces, than typically developing (TD) peers. Eye-tracking studies highlight these visual exploration differences, linked to difficulties in joint attention, emotion recognition, and theory of mind, as well as in executive and memory functions. Standard diagnostic tests often require active participation and sufficient language, which makes assessment challenging for children with ASD and additional cognitive or language impairments. This research project investigates how visual activity supports social cognition depending on cognitive and language levels, hypothesizing that eye-tracking can provide useful indicators for ASD screening and diagnosis.

Multimodal Quantified Analysis of Facial Movements: Comparison Between Pathological and Control Subjects

The facial palsy is a frequent disease with a lot of etiologies. It has variable severities with sometimes heavy functional repercussions and different recovery potentials. The proposed treatments are based on surgery, physiotherapy and botulinum toxin injections. However, when recovery is incomplete, acceptance is more difficult, with an impacted quality of life. Thanks to Motion Capture and Electromyography, a quantification of the facial mimicry is now possible with a great precision. In addition with the quantification of the facial mimicry, eye-tracking, wich is widely used in the marketing field, but it also finds medical applications including head and neck lesions and facial palsy in particular, will be used to evaluate the visio of the patients on their pathology in function of the movement quantification measured with MoCap and Electromyography. The aim of this research is to measure in a combined way the action potentials by sEMG and the amplitudes of displacement of the markers in motion capture, for movements determined in a population of patients presenting a facial pathology, in order to compare them with reference values obtained in healthy subjects. In a second step, the aim will be to study if there is a link between the way the patient looks at his pathology and the results of his management (treatment, rehabilitation) which will be quantitatively evaluated thanks to MoCap and sEMG.