Feasibility and applicability of a clinical assessment of both the ON and OFF pathways in patients with glaucoma and controls.

Abstract

"Purpose: To assess the feasibility and clinical utility of a head-mounted, On/Off perimetry test and to investigate the effect of early to moderate glaucoma on reaction time and accuracy to ON and OFF perimetric stimuli. Methods: We tested one eye each of 9 patients with early to moderate primary open angle glaucoma (mean = 71.88 years, std = 5.17), 9 visually-normal control patients of a similar age (mean = 63.88 years, std = 5.17 ) , and 9 visually-normal optometry students (ages 22-25 years). We used a head mounted display equipped with an eye tracker (HTC VIVE embedded Tobii). Custom software (Unity, version 2017) was used to create the stimuli and a library provided by Tobii Pro was used to measure eye movements at 120 Hz. Stimulus size changed as a function of eccentricity using a power law relationship: stimulus size= minimum scale*(eccentricity/5)^α. Eye movements were restricted to a central circle with a 2.5 degree radius. Stimulus contrast was initially set to 100%. A single test comprised of 579 trials, including 51 catch trials, presented at 90 different positions in the visual field. Each test location was repeated 3 times for both light and dark stimuli, with 6 repeats in each of two blind spot positions. Results: Our results demonstrate asymmetry between the two achromatic visual transduction pathways. These results support previous findings that dark targets elicit a faster and more accurate response than light targets, when presented on binary background noise. Our results extend previous work by demonstrating that the two pathways remain asymmetrical in eccentricities up to 30 degree from fixation. We also show that the relationship between the percentage of correct responses for ON pathway and OFF pathway stimuli follows a power function, wherein glaucoma and controls overlap (R2=0.842) . This overlap decreases when we quantify only the subthreshold (unseen) increment targets in a linear relationship (R2=0.7074). All controls had less than 12% of subthreshold increment targets whereas the percentage of subthreshold targets was higher for 75% of the glaucoma subjects, even in early stages of the disease. CONCLUSION We have demonstrated that ON/OFF perimetry is feasible in a VR environment and confirmed an asymmetry between the ON and OFF pathways in patients with glaucoma and control patients in both central and peripheral visual fields. We measured on-pathway deficits in patients with limited loss of visual sensitivity which may improve detection of early disease. Future work will focus on optimizing stimulus parameters to improve the sensitivity and specificity of this test."