Clinicians can more accurately classify a patient’s cognitive health status by increasing the number and variety of patient diagnostic drawing tasks. That’s according to researchers who aimed to address what they said is a lack of precise screening when using tests that analyze drawing traits.
Analysis of the drawing process using a digital tablet and pen has been used to help detect signs of Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment. But most studies analyze individual drawing tasks separately. The investigators theorized that adding more data from a combination of drawing tasks could improve the detection.
“Although it’s clear that motion- and pause-related drawing traits can be used to screen for cognitive impairments, most screening tests remain relatively inaccurate,” said Tetsuaki Arai, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Tsukuba in Japan. “We wondered what might happen if we were to analyze these traits while people performed a range of different drawing tasks.”
Five different standardized drawing tests helped capture different aspects of cognition. Twenty-two different drawing features, such as pen pressure, pen posture, speed and pauses, were analyzed. These features were compared with scores from seven different tests of cognitive function. The data was also run through a computer program to see how well the drawing traits could help identify people with normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease.
The accuracy of all five tests was about 75% — almost 10% better than the performance of any of the tests by themselves, the researchers reported.
“We were surprised by how well the combination of drawing traits extracted from multiple tasks worked by capturing different, complementary aspects of cognitive impairments,” Arai said in a statement.
Clinicians and researchers have increasingly trained their focus on early diagnosis of cognitive impairment. The hope is that targeted therapies and lifestyle changes will have a better chance of helping to slow or prevent the progress of decline.
The drawing study is another step toward improved early diagnostics, Arai said.
“Although this was a relatively small study, the results are encouraging,” he said. “[They] pave the way for better screening tests for cognitive impairments.”
The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Related articles:
Proposal aims to better equip clinicians for early dementia detection, diagnosis
It’s ‘never too late’ to prevent or delay dementia, international commission claims
Early Alzheimer’s diagnosis may unintentionally hamper social engagement
