Cataplexy Detection: Neurologists, You Are Not Alone!

Narcolepsy with cataplexy is a severe lifelong disorder characterized, among the others, by the sudden loss of bilateral face muscle tone triggered by emotions (cataplexy). In this extended abstract, we present two methodologies for the automatic analysis of patients’ videos able to assist neurologists in diagnosing the disease and/or detecting attacks. Indeed, recent findings demonstrated that the detection of abnormal motor behaviors in video recordings of patients undergoing emotional stimulation is effective in characterizing the disease symptoms. Such motor behaviors (ptosis, mouth opening, head drop) are however to be discovered by neurologists through manual inspection of patients’ videos. Automatic content-based video analysis is clearly of immediate help here. Experimental results conducted on real data support the effectiveness of the presented automated techniques.