A new diagnostic tool is allowing central New York physicians to more quickly determine if a young child has autism.
The tool is called EarliPoint Evaluation. It’s meant for children between 16 and 30 months old. According to Henry Roane, the head of the Golisano Center for Special Needs in Syracuse, the idea is to let technology closely follow the child's eyes as they watch a video on an iPad-like device.
"Essentially what that does is correlate where the child's looking, or the eye tracking, as they call it," Roans said. "They correlate that with a database to suggest this is more or less similar to what a child with or without autism would be doing, and that's how the diagnosis is made."
Roane said this device can do in under 20 minutes what it takes a team of clinicians several hours to do. For the children, early diagnosis is very important.
"The earlier you can identify whether the child has a neuro-developmental disability like autism and you can get them into therapy to address things like language and socialization, then they're going to have better long-term outcomes," Roan said.
Upstate has been using the device since the fall, and has diagnosed half the tested children with autism. The strategy was approved by the FDA in 2023.
