Gram-based Attentive Neural Ordinary Differential Equations Network for Video Nystagmography Classification

Video nystagmography (VNG) is the diagnostic gold standard of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), which requires medical professionals to examine the direction, frequency, intensity, duration, and variation in the strength of nystagmus on a VNG video. This is a tedious process heavily influenced by the doctor's experience, which is error-prone. Recent automatic VNG classification methods approach this problem from the perspective of video analysis without considering medical prior knowledge, resulting in unsatisfactory accuracy and limited diagnostic capability for nystagmographic types, thereby preventing their clinical application. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end data-driven novel BPPV diagnosis framework (TC-BPPV) by considering this problem as an eye trajectory classification problem due to the disease's symptoms and experts' prior knowledge. In this framework, we utilize an eye movement tracking system to capture the eye trajectory and propose the Gram-based attentive neural ordinary differential equations network (Gram-AODE) to perform classification. We validate our framework using the VNG dataset provided by the collaborative university hospital and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We also evaluate Gram-AODE on multiple open-source benchmarks to demonstrate its effectiveness in trajectory classification. Code is available at https://github.com/ XiheQiu/Gram-AODE.