Application of Eye Movement Analysis in Medicine: A Review Across Neurodevelopmental, Neurological, and Neurodegenerative Disorders

Eye tracking has emerged as a valuable, non-invasive tool for identifying cognitive and motor abnormalities across a wide range of brain-related disorders. Recent studies have explored its utility in neurodevelopmental, neurological, and neurodegenerative conditions. This review synthesizes the findings of studies that apply eye movement analysis including fixation patterns, saccades, scanpaths, and pupil dynamics combined with machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches for disease detection and classification. Particular attention is given to the design of eye-tracking tasks, feature extraction strategies, and algorithmic frameworks. Across clinical categories, models such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), random forests (RF), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated promising diagnostic potential, with several studies reporting classification accuracies exceeding 80%, although performance varies depending on the task design, dataset characteristics, and validation methodology. These findings support the potential of eye movement-based biomarkers for early detection and clinical monitoring. Despite encouraging results, current research faces important limitations, including small sample sizes, a lack of standardization, and limited generalizability across populations. To advance clinical translation, future work should emphasize data augmentation, multimodal integration, external validation, and the use of explainable AI (XAI). Overall, eye movement analysis offers a scalable and objective pathway toward improving diagnostic precision in brain-related disorders.