CHILDREN'S NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT TEST

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童和青少年可能患有与行为和认知脑功能异常相关的各种疾病。该项目将创建一个工具，用于评估青少年群体的认知脑功能，该工具是强大的，可重复的，并且没有文化偏见。它建立在我们开发的创新方法的基础上，这些方法将联合收割机与任务相关的反应速度和准确性测量与神经生理信号的伴随监测相结合。到目前为止，我们已经确定，这样的组合措施提高了检测医学治疗的神经认知效应的灵敏度，有助于将由于努力或警觉水平的变化而产生的效应与那些与注意力和记忆调节相关的效应分开，在没有发育或医学变化的情况下随时间推移是稳定的，并且与认知能力的常规措施高度相关。然而，这些方法目前仅限于将患者的治疗后测试结果与患者自己的治疗前基线进行比较。这种限制类似于温度计，它只告诉病人的温度是否从最后一次测量或汽车的速度表显示从昨天每小时英里的变化。目前的项目关注的是克服这一局限性，利用年龄匹配的参考组，以获得持续的注意力和工作记忆，可用于衡量一个孩子的神经认知能力是否在正常范围内，以及是否遵循一个典型的成熟的进展时，在一个较长的时间内反复测试的神经相关的评估。这将在第二阶段通过收集和分析规范数据库来完成，该数据库将能够将儿童的行为和神经反应与健康年龄匹配的同龄人进行比较，以及将随着时间的推移观察到的任何变化与正常成熟过程的结果进行比较。然后，将通过应用于从患有影响神经认知功能的几种临床疾病的儿童中收集的数据来验证改进的措施，这些疾病包括睡眠障碍，癫痫，ADHD和轻度创伤性头部损伤。由此产生的方法将体现在第一种，高度自动化的儿童神经生理认知评估测试（CNCAT）。由于有大量的儿童可以从CNCAT的评估中受益，并与他们的医疗保健相结合，因此该测试具有良好的商业前景。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children and adolescents can suffer from a variety of conditions associated with abnormalities in behavior and cognitive brain function. This project will create a tool for assessing cognitive brain function in juvenile populations that is robust, repeatable, and free of cultural bias. It builds on innovative methods we have developed that combine task-related measures of response speed and accuracy with concomitant monitoring of neurophysiologic signals. We have so far established that such combined measures improve sensitivity for detecting the neurocognitive effects of medical treatments, help to separate effects due to variations in level of effort or alertness from those related to the regulation of attention and memory, are stable over time in the absence of developmental or medical changes, and are highly correlated with conventional measures of cognitive ability. However these methods are currently limited to comparing a patient's post-treatment test results to that patient's own pre-treatment baseline. This limitation is analogous to a thermometer that only tells whether a patient's temperature changed from the last measurement or an automobile whose speedometer shows change in miles per hour from yesterday. The current project is concerned with overcoming this limitation by utilizing age-matched reference groups to derive assessments of the neural correlates of sustained attention and working memory that can be used to gauge whether a child's neurocognitive ability is within normal bounds and whether it follows a typically maturational progression when tested repeatedly over an extended period. This will be accomplished in Phase II by collecting and analyzing a normative database that will enable comparison of a child's behavioral and neural responses with those of healthy age-matched peers, as well as comparison of any changes observed over time to those which would be expected as a result of normal maturational processes. The improved measures will then be validated by application to data collected from children with several clinical disorders that affect neurocognitive function including sleep disorders, epilepsy, ADHD and mild traumatic head injury. The resulting method will be embodied in a first-of-its-kind, highly automated Children's Neurophysiologic Cognitive Assessment Test (CNCAT). Because there is a large population of children that could benefit from assessment with the CNCAT in conjunction with their medical care, the test has a promising commercial future.