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、可重复且不受文化偏见的影响。它建立在我们开发的创新方法的基础上，将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，这种综合措施提高了检测医学治疗的神经认知效果的敏感性，有助于将努力或警觉性水平的变化与注意力和记忆的调节相关的影响分开，在没有发育或医学变化的情况下，随着时间的推移是稳定的，并且与传统的认知能力措施高度相关。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。这种限制类似于一个温度计，它只能告诉病人的温度与上次测量时相比是否发生了变化，或者一辆汽车的速度计显示的是与昨天相比每小时英里数的变化。目前的项目是通过使用年龄匹配的参照组来获得对持续注意力和工作记忆的神经相关性的评估，这可以用来衡量儿童的神经认知能力是否在正常范围内，以及在长时间重复测试后是否遵循典型的成熟发展。这将在第二阶段通过收集和分析一个规范性数据库来完成，该数据库将能够将儿童的行为和神经反应与同龄健康儿童的行为和神经反应进行比较，并将长期观察到的任何变化与正常成熟过程所预期的变化进行比较。改进后的措施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，这些疾病包括睡眠障碍、癫痫、多动症和轻度创伤性头部损伤。由此产生的方法将体现在其首创的，高度自动化的儿童神经生理认知评估测试（CNCAT）。因为有大量的儿童可以从CNCAT的评估和他们的医疗护理中受益，所以这项测试有一个很好的商业前景。

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.