L'UTILIZZO DI PERSONAL COMPUTER PER LA COMPLETA GESTIONE DI UN LABORATORIO PER LO STUDIO DELLA MOTILITA OCULARE

The authors describe the features of a personal computer (PC) based oculomotor laboratory. The PC controls the devices used to elicit both saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements according to the paradigm chosen by the operator. The oculographic signal is sampled at 250 Hz and stored on floppy disk for the following two-step analysis. In the first step an interactive program enables the measurement of the main parameters for each saccade (i.e amplitude, duration, peak velocity, latency) or smooth pursuit ramp (gain). In the second step, the relationships existing between these parameters are evaluated according to ad hoc statistical procedures implemented by the laboratory. All the patient's data, the oculographic recordings, the oculomotor parameters and their relationship and the final evaluation are stored in a database making the retrieval procedures easy.