Two scientific research studies published today reveal that the Marcus Autism Center, a subsidiary of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, has developed the first “biomarker-based, eye-tracking diagnostic technology” now available to help diagnose autism.

The tool, called EarliPoint Evaluation, is authorized for use in children between 16 and 30 months of age to aid in the diagnosis and assessment of autism. The two research studies were published today in The Journal of The American Medical Association (JAMA) and JAMA Network Open. The researchers presented data to validate its use in the early diagnosis of autism.

The EarliPoint Evaluation tool measures children’s looking behavior to provide clinicians with objective measurements of each child’s strengths and vulnerabilities. In the studies published today, these measurements predicted expert clinician assessments with a high degree of accuracy. 

Objective measurements can help speed the time to diagnosis and speed the start of individualized treatment plans for newly diagnosed children at younger ages, which has been shown to lead to better outcomes for children with autism. 

“This technology is a first-of-its-kind, biomarker-based tool developed and clinically validated to aid in the diagnosis of autism,” said Dr. Ami Klin, who serves as director of the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s. He also is the Division Chief of Autism and Developmental Disabilities at Emory University School of Medicine. 

“The published studies show that objective, performance-based biomarkers of children’s looking behavior can help clinicians by reducing the time required for accurate autism diagnosis from multiple hours of clinician assessment to as little as 12 minutes of objective measurements,” Dr. Klin continued in a statement. “The tool collects data at…