Eye-tracking-based measurement of social visual engagement — how kids look at and learn from their social environment — was predictive of autism diagnosis by clinical experts in young children, researchers said.
In a multisite prospective study, the eye-tracking tool that measures social visual engagement had a sensitivity of 78% and a specificity of 85.4% in a subgroup of 335 children whose autism diagnosis was certain, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.90 (95% CI 0.87-0.94), reported Warren Jones, PhD, of Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and colleagues in JAMA.
In contrast, for 140 children for whom the diagnosis was uncertain, the test’s sensitivity was 56.3% and specificity was 68.1%.
“The index test’s performance metrics were significantly better when the reference standard was certain relative to uncertain” (P
Eye
0.001),p>