Entwicklung eines minimal-invasiven Magnetsystems zur hochqualitativen drahtlosen Aufzeichnung von Augenbewegungen bei nicht-menschlichen Primaten

01/07/2020 to 30/06/2021

Precise tracking of eye position is critical in a great variety of sensory, cognitive, and motor control investigations of brain function. In human and non-human primates, the majority of experiments nowadays rely on non-invasive video-based eye trackers, which have experienced significant improvements in performance during the last few decades. However, for tiny fixational eye movements, which are emerging to play important roles in cognition and in reformatting of the spatio-temporal statistics of images entering into the visual system, video-based eye trackers are still lacking. For example, this has rendered human investigations of ocular drifts rare. In non-human primates, which constitute our focus here, the gold standard for eye tracking remains the scleral search coil technique. While this technique is suitable for studying even the tiniest of fixational eye movements, it is a highly invasive and due to the surgical procedures and their probable consequences problematic. Therefore, our goal is to develop a minimally invasive eye tracking system for non-human primates. The technique uses wireless sensing of magnetic fields that rotate with the eye, and it is minimally invasive because it requires only a single implantation surgery, to implant tiny magnets around the eye orbit for creating the magnetic field. Using extensive theoretical and simulation preliminary experiments, we show that approaching the quality of scleral search coils is possible with the proposed technique.