OVISTA doesn't ask a patient anything. It watches how their eyes move through three short, standardized tasks — each one aimed at a different circuit in the brain's attention and inhibition network, the same networks affected early in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Each task takes well under two minutes. Together, the full screening session runs about five minutes — short enough to fit inside a normal primary care visit.
Looks at a central dot, then simply looks toward a second dot the moment it appears elsewhere on the screen — the most natural, reflexive eye movement there is.
How quickly and accurately the eyes respond to a new visual target. This is the baseline: raw sensorimotor speed, before anything else is asked of the patient.
It establishes a personal baseline for reaction time, so slower or less accurate results on the harder tasks that follow can be interpreted correctly, not mistaken for simple age-related slowing.
Sees a dot appear on one side of the screen, and is asked to look toward the mirror-opposite side instead — deliberately looking away from where attention is pulled.
How reliably the patient can suppress the automatic urge to look at something new, and voluntarily direct their gaze instead. Errors and delays here are tracked closely.
This is the single most sensitive task in the battery. The inhibition circuit it probes is among the first affected in early Alzheimer's disease and FTD, often before memory symptoms are noticeable.
Holds their gaze steady on a still point — first at the center of the screen, then in sequence at several positions further out — without looking away.
How steady the eyes stay — small drifts, tiny involuntary movements, and how often gaze breaks away from the target unintentionally.
Sustained attentional control tends to degrade before it's consciously noticed. Instability here is a quiet, objective marker of that decline.
Antisaccade trials can be built a few different ways. OVISTA deliberately uses one specific version — chosen because the evidence shows it's more sensitive to early Alzheimer's-related change, not because it was the easiest to build.
Many eye-tracking setups have the central dot vanish and the new target appear at exactly the same moment — no pause in between. It's a reasonable, widely used default. It's just not what OVISTA uses.
OVISTA leaves a short blank gap — about 200 milliseconds of nothing — between the dot disappearing and the target appearing. That pause removes the "anchor" the eyes were resting on, so the brain has to actively decide where to look next, rather than simply reacting.
The 200-millisecond gap is a deliberate departure from the more common clinical default — chosen because evidence specific to Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment supports it as the more sensitive version of the task. It's a small design decision with a documented reason behind it, and that's true of most of what goes into an OVISTA protocol.
Every OVISTA session produces a single, clear output: a risk band, not a diagnosis. It tells the clinician how a patient's oculomotor performance compares to what's expected for their age and sex — nothing more, nothing less.
Every result is expressed against OVISTA's own age- and sex-adjusted normative reference — never against a fixed cutoff pulled from a single study. The output is a calibrated risk band, meant to inform the next clinical step, not replace it.
A 68-year-old patient completes the screening and lands in the Amber band — mild deviation from the expected range for their age and sex, mainly driven by longer antisaccade latency and a higher error rate. That result doesn't mean the patient has Alzheimer's disease or FTD. It means their oculomotor performance falls outside the typical range often enough to warrant a closer look. In practice, that usually translates to a referral to neurology or a memory clinic for full assessment — the same referral judgment the clinician would already be exercising, just made with one more objective data point in hand.
OVISTA is designed to sit at the front door of care, not to replace what happens after.