Detecting Major Depression Disorder with Multiview Eye Movement Features in a Novel Oil Painting Paradigm

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a debilitating condition marked by persistent low mood, reduced interest, cognitive impairments, and vegetative neurological symptoms such as sleep and appetite disturbances. In this paper, we collected eye movement signals from 40 patients diagnosed with MDD and 40 healthy controls to study the relation between eye movements and cognitive processes for depression detection. The eye movement data were captured during a novel emotional cognition task using oil paintings. Subsequently, the data were transformed into multiview eye movement features, including heatmaps, trajectories, and statistical vectors. Rigorous statistical analyses were then conducted on these features to identify significant patterns and correlations between eye movements and depressive symptoms. A multiview invariant & specific eye movement model (MISEYE) was proposed to fuse different eye movement features. The proposed achieved an accuracy rate of 79.88% in depression detection. This performance surpassed not only the outcomes of single-mode approaches and combinations of any two features but also outperformed other fusion methodologies. These findings not only shed light on the intricate relationship between eye movement patterns and MDD but also underscore the potential of eye-tracking technology in psychiatric research.