A Virtual Morris Water Maze to Study Neurodegenarative Disorders

Abstract

Navigation is a crucial cognitive skill that allows humans and animals to move from one place to another without getting lost. In neurological patients this skill can be impaired, when neural structures that form the brain networks important for spatial learning and navigation are impaired. Thus, spatial navigation represents an important measure of cognitive health that is impossible to test in a clinical examination, due to lack of space in examination rooms. Consequently, spatial navigation is largely neglected in the clinical assessment of neurological, neurosurgical and psychiatric patients. Virtual reality represents a unique opportunity to develop a systematic assessment of spatial navigation for diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring of millions of patients presenting with cognitive decline in the clinical routine. Therefore, we have adapted a classical spatial navigation paradigm that was developed for animal research, the "Morris Water Maze" as an openly available Virtual Reality (VR) application, that allows objective quantification of navigational skills in humans. This tool may be used in the future to aid the assessment of the human navigation system in health and neurological disease.