Journal article
Virtual Reality Tools for Assessing Unilateral Spatial Neglect: A Novel Opportunity for Data Collection
JOVE-JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS, (169), e61951
Mar 2021
PMID: 33779608
Abstract
Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is a syndrome characterized by inattention to or inaction in one side of space and affects between 23-46% of acute stroke survivors. The diagnosis and characterization of these symptoms in individual patients can be challenging and often requires skilled clinical staff. Virtual reality (VR) presents an opportunity to develop novel assessment tools for patients with USN. We aimed to design and build a VR tool to detect and characterize subtle USN symptoms, and to test the tool on subjects treated with inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of cortical regions associated with USN. We created three experimental conditions by applying TMS to two distinct regions of cortex associated with visuospatial processing-the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) - and applied sham TMS as a control. We then placed subjects in a virtual reality environment in which they were asked to identify the flowers with lateral asymmetries of flowers distributed across bushes in both hemispaces, with dynamic difficulty adjustment based on each subject's performance. We found significant differences in average head yaw between subjects stimulated at the STG and those stimulated at the SMG and marginally significant effects in the average visual axis. VR technology is becoming more accessible, affordable, and robust, presenting an exciting opportunity to create useful and novel game-like tools. In conjunction with TMS, these tools could be used to study specific, isolated, artificial neurological deficits in healthy subjects, informing the creation of VR-based diagnostic tools for patients with deficits due to acquired brain injury. This study is the first to our knowledge in which artificially generated USN symptoms have been evaluated with a VR task.
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Details
- Title
- Virtual Reality Tools for Assessing Unilateral Spatial Neglect: A Novel Opportunity for Data Collection
- Publication Details
- JOVE-JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS, (169), e61951
- Publisher
- JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS; CAMBRIDGE
- Grant note
- This work was supported by the University Research Fund (URF) from the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Heart Association's Student Scholarships in Cerebrovascular Disease & Stroke. Special thanks to the researchers, clinicians and staff of the Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation for their ongoing support.
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Drexel University
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000646200200025
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85103292555
- Other Identifier
- 991021860751404721
InCites Highlights
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Neurosciences