CHILDREN'S NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT TEST

描述(由申请者提供)：儿童和青少年可能患有与行为和认知大脑功能异常相关的各种情况。该项目将创建一种工具，用于评估青少年群体的认知大脑功能，该工具稳健、可重复且没有文化偏见。它建立在我们开发的创新方法的基础上，这些方法将与任务相关的反应速度和准确性测量与伴随的神经生理信号监测结合在一起。到目前为止，我们已经确定，这种综合测量方法提高了检测医疗神经认知影响的敏感度，有助于将由于努力或警觉水平的变化而产生的影响与与注意力和记忆调节有关的影响区分开来，在没有发育或医学变化的情况下随着时间的推移保持稳定，并且与传统的认知能力测量高度相关。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。这一限制类似于温度计，它只显示患者的体温与上次测量结果相比是否发生了变化，或者汽车的速度计显示的时速与昨天相比是否发生了变化。目前的项目致力于克服这一限制，方法是利用年龄匹配的参照组来得出对持续注意力和工作记忆的神经相关性的评估，这些评估可以用来衡量儿童的神经认知能力是否在正常范围内，以及当在较长一段时间内重复测试时，它是否遵循典型的成熟进程。这将在第二阶段通过收集和分析一个标准数据库来实现，该数据库将能够将儿童的行为和神经反应与年龄匹配的健康同龄人的反应进行比较，并将随时间观察到的任何变化与正常成熟过程预期的变化进行比较。然后，这些改进的措施将通过应用于从患有几种临床障碍的儿童收集的数据来验证，这些障碍会影响神经认知功能，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个同类的，高度自动化的儿童神经生理认知评估测试(CNCAT)中。由于有大量的儿童可以从CNCAT的评估和他们的医疗护理中受益，这项测试具有很好的商业前景。

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.