The eyes are more than just windows to the soul. Tracking saccades can help doctors identify various problems with brain health. That's why French-Belgian medical technology startup Neurocruise is building fast, accessible eye-tracking technology that incorporates AI-driven analytics. The company wants to enable healthcare providers to use eye tracking to help diagnose neurodegenerative conditions.
The company has begun to focus on Parkinson's disease, which typically already includes testing of patients' eye movements. Today, doctors ask patients to “follow my fingers,” but NeuroCruise allows clinicians to use a proprietary portable headset to capture eye movements at 800 frames per second, and then in just a few seconds. I would like to be able to perform analysis on the data. seconds.
The three-and-a-half-year-old organization's co-founders, both neuroscience researchers, credit the high rate of misdiagnosis of Parkinson's disease as one of the factors in their decision to initially focus on the disease. Pointed out. But their ambitions extend further. They paint a picture of a future where their devices become “stethoscopes for the brain.” For example, imagine what would happen if your annual trip to the optician allowed you to easily scan your brain health and compare it to standard benchmarks for your age. The startup, which aims to help 10 million patients by 2023, says its eye-tracking protocols can also help screen for other diseases and conditions such as concussions, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and stroke. It is said that there is a possibility.
So how does this device work? Currently, when patients look through a headset, they see a screen with dots. The clinician then asks them to follow the dot with their eyes, and the device records and analyzes their eye movements, extracting data that can be used as disease biomarkers by measuring things like latency and error rate. To do. It also provides clinicians with standard values expected from a healthy population with which to compare patient results.
“The first scientific paper using eye tracking to diagnose patients was in 1905,” Antoine Pouppez, co-founder and CEO of neuroClues, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview, explaining that the technology was He pointed out that it was used to diagnose schizophrenia. The introduction of video eye trackers in the 1960s sparked a boom in research into techniques to track neurological diseases. But decades of research into the usefulness of eye tracking as a diagnostic technique did not translate into widespread clinical adoption because the technology either didn't exist yet or was too expensive, Poupez said. .
“That's where this technology was born. It was my co-founder's frustration that saw there was a lot of value in eye tracking. It was clinically proven in a research setting with thousands of patients. “Although it has been proven in studies, it has not yet been used in clinical practice,” he said. “Today's doctors use their fingers and literally say, 'Follow my fingers,' but their eyes are moving at 600 degrees per second. That's three eye movements per second. Therefore, it is very difficult, almost impossible, to assess how well you are moving around. [by human eye alone]”
Similarly, some researchers have discovered the potential for further use of eye tracking as a diagnostic aid.
US-based Neurosync, for example, offers a VR headset paired with FDA-cleared eye-tracking software that it says can analyze the wearer's eye movements “as an aid to concussion diagnosis.” This product is targeted at soccer players and other contact sports athletes. People at high risk of head injury.
Mobile app makers such as BrainEye are also marketing smartphone-based eye-tracking technology to consumers for self-diagnosing “brain health.” (Such claims have not been evaluated by medical device regulatory authorities.)
But neuroClues stands out in a number of ways. First, the company says its headset can be installed in a typical clinician's office without the need for a darkroom setup or specialized computing hardware. Rather than using off-the-shelf hardware, we are developing a specialized eye-tracking headset for eye exams designed to record at high speeds and control the recording environment. The organization's founders further claim that by building proprietary software, neuroClues enjoys unparalleled speed of data collection on commercially deployed non-static devices.
To protect these ostensible advantages, neuroClues has obtained (or applied for) numerous patents covering various aspects of its design, including its hardware and software synchronization and data analysis approaches. This startup is also in progress. The company hopes to submit an application for FDA approval and have its device cleared for use as a clinical support tool in the United States later this year. The company is working on a similar application in the European Union and expects regulatory approval there in 2025.
“Currently, we are the only company on the market that records 800 frames per second on a portable device,” Poupes said, noting that the “gold standard” in research is 1,000 frames per second. “There are no clinical or non-clinical products running it at that frame rate. That meant we had to remove a barrier that no one had been able to overcome before.”
Image credit: Neurocruise
Developed at the Paris Brain Institute, NeuroCruise hopes the first eye-tracking headsets will be introduced into specialist facilities such as university hospitals and used on patients who have already been referred to consultants. Because eye-tracking testing is an established medical intervention, the service will be reimbursed through existing health insurance codes, it said. The company said it is also in talks with a number of other companies in the United States and Europe that are interested in its hardware and software.
This first version of the device was designed as a diagnostic aid, with human clinicians still responsible for interpreting the results. But Poupes said the team's goal is to advance the technology that provides interpretation of the data, allowing the device to be more widely deployed.
“Our goal is to move quickly to provide diagnostic capabilities to practicing physicians,” he told us. “We want to bring devices like this to market in 2026 or 2020, and to broaden our horizons and really break into the market. [the toolbox of] All neurologists in the US and Europe. ”
The startup has announced the completion of a €5 million pre-Series A round of funding led by the White Fund and the European Commission's EIC Accelerator Program. In addition to existing investor Invest.BW, a number of business angels also participated, including UCB, former Artwall board chairman Fiona du Monceau, and IBA CEO Olivier Legrand. Including this round, neuroClues has raised a total of €12 million since its founding in 2020.
Poupez said the company will consider holding a Series A within the next 12 to 18 months. “Our existing investors and the European Commission have already expressed interest in participating, and basically I am looking for a lead investor,” he added.