This study was designed to determine whether OKN responses could provide a more objective and reliable means to assess visual function in patients with significant visual impairment, for whom current testing modalities have a limited ability to reliably quantify changes in visual function. The study was motivated by our desire to develop better testing methods for patients who may eventually receive a retinal prosthesis that is currently under development,
11 and by the results of previous studies, which indicated that measures of OKN may provide a means to quantify visual function objectively. Our results showed that the stimulus
V max for an above threshold OKN response was dependent on both the VA and VF of the subject and the SF of the OKN stimulus (see the equation).
As early as 1958, researchers demonstrated that OKN responses may provide additional information on visual function in patients with normal or subnormal vision.
12 Millidot et al.
17 studied OKN eye movement responses to a sinusoidal-moving grating and found that, at higher stimulus SFs, there was a point at which eye movements could no longer be generated. Later, Khan et al.
18 compared OKN responses to a Catford apparatus with VA in normally sighted subjects, normal subjects with blurred vision from optical “fogging,” and patients with ocular disease that reduced central VA. They found that subjects with a VA of 20/50 or better had a good correlation between the traditional, subjective measure of Snellen acuity and the objective measure of vision made by recording OKN responses. Other studies have also demonstrated this correlation, at least at VAs as low as 20/400.
19 20 21 22 More recently, Shin et al.
23 evaluated eye movements in the presence of horizontal OKN stimuli in 89 patients with a variety of ocular diseases and found that OKN induction and suppression methods provide a satisfactory means of determining objective VA. Their study, however, did not use full-field OKN stimuli, varied the stimuli only between 0.2° and 0.6°, and used only one velocity (10 deg/s) for each trial run. Our study is distinctive in that we (1) studied OKN responses of severely visually impaired subjects (lowest VA measured was 20/2560, and smallest measured VF size was 2°); (2) used full-field OKN stimuli
24 ; and (3) correlated OKN responses to measures of both central acuity (using the logMAR acuity paradigm) and peripheral vision (assessed with Goldmann perimetry). We analyzed OKN responses by measuring the SCV responses of subjects across a range of stimulus spatial frequencies and across a range of OKN drum velocities.
We analyzed our data individually for each patient in an attempt to identify outliers from the overall trends that we observed for both VA and VF results. Two subjects (patients 4 and 12 in
Table 1 ) had good central VA but extremely restricted VFs. Both patients had a low response rate with inconsistent OKN responses, one of which fit the model well and one of which did not. There were periods of consistent OKN response in patient 12, but the amplitude was usually lower than our threshold, resulting in a lower
V max than expected. The response in patient 4 agreed well with the model. These findings are consistent with literature, which has demonstrated the important contribution of peripheral retinal stimulation for the generation of OKN responses. Specifically, Miyoshi
25 evaluated the role of the fovea and peripheral retina in generating OKN responses by using a masking cylinder to separate the VF into peripheral and foveal retinal stimulation and found that, as central VF narrowed, nystagmus elicitation was more difficult.
At the other extreme, one of our subjects had low central VA (5/200 bilaterally) because of central scotoma (30° and 40°, respectively), but normal peripheral vision. Even though this patient could not identify characters on the logMAR VA chart, he had an OKN response that approximated that of the normal patients. Previous studies have analyzed OKN responses in patients with central VF defects and have revealed similar findings.
26 27 For example, Valmaggia et al.
13 and Valmaggia and Gottlob
14 analyzed OKN responses in patients with large central scotomas of various sizes secondary to AMD. They found that there was no significant difference in the OKN gain between the control group and patients with central scotomas of less than 20° of visual angle.
These outlier cases highlight the previously studied variation between OKN stimuli that target specifically the peripheral and foveal areas of the retina by using the fogging technique to target the area of interest. Although our study demonstrated this effect through full-field OKN stimulation in patients with peripheral and central scotomas due to underlying retinal disease, future studies could examine this by using OKN stimuli with spatial masking so that only the foveal or peripheral areas of the retina are stimulated.
Besides the retinal area of stimulation, two other variables of the OKN stimulus can affect the magnitude of the response: the SF of the stripes (or grating) and the velocity of the entire pattern. In this study, both variables were examined. The results demonstrate that patients with extremely poor vision require testing at low velocities and low SFs. In contrast, higher velocities and SFs are necessary for evaluating subjects with visual acuities better than 20/80.
Although our method of recording OKN, electrooculography, has limitations including signal-to-noise ratio, baseline drift, resolution, and dependence of corneoretinal potential (CRP) on ambient light level, we thought it was the most appropriate recording method for this study. Scleral search coils have 1 minute of arc resolution over a bandwidth of 1000 Hz, and a linearity of 0.25% over a range of ±30°,
28 but typically cannot be used for more than approximately 30 minutes in one session.
29 Our sessions exceeded 1 hour. There is also the risk of corneal abrasion and disease transmission if the fairly costly coils are reused. Video oculography has a resolution for horizontal eye movements of 0.01°, with an accuracy (horizontal) of 0.18 ± 0.15° over a ±30° range.
30 Despite the greater resolution of search coils and video compared to EOG, the three methods produce very similar estimates of human OKN gains by using horizontally moving stripes. In their comparison of coil with video techniques, Teiwes et al.
30 estimate the OKN gain to be 0.78 ± 0.14 with the use of coils and 0.77 ± 0.14 on the same three subjects with video. Our estimate on 50 normal vision subjects is 0.76 ± 0.15. We argue that the EOG, although less accurate than video and search coils, is still adequate for this study because the estimates of OKN gain does not differ significantly from the video and search coil techniques.
To increase the signal-to-noise ratio, we tried to decrease the electrode impedance via thorough skin preparation before mounting the electrodes. Digital filtering and time averaging of the data reduced the noise to a level much less than the response changes we saw among the different stripe patterns. Baseline drift is more of a limitation when measuring gaze position over long periods. This effect was not a factor in the EOG calibration, because it involved only short periods. Our analysis focused on SCV, rather than absolute gaze position, and the velocity resolution of our system was much greater than the magnitude of the slow drift. Since the CRP depends on ambient light level, we attempted to keep the level relatively even during the test runs, provided ample time to adjust to any changes, and made EOG calibrations at the beginning and end of each set of trials. With these modifications, the use of EOG in this study produced statistically significant differences in V max as a function of SF and VA.
Future studies would benefit from a larger sample size that includes age-matched controls, a higher contrast ratio, inclusion of subjects with light-perception vision, and testing of the same subjects on multiple days. Previous studies have found that OKN gain decreases and OKN gain variability increases with age.
31 Although there was a disparity between the ages of our normal and patient groups due to selection criteria (as outlined in the methods section), there was no reduction in
V max with increasing age in our study. Future studies, nonetheless, would benefit from age-matched controls to eliminate this potential confounder. In addition, previous researchers such as Wang et al.
32 have shown that threshold luminance for OKN triggering increases as target velocity increases. The projection system used in these experiments has the advantages of being full-field and easy to change in SF, but the relatively low contrast ratio of approximately 2:1 may have increased the variability of the OKN responses. Future studies could be conducted to evaluate the effects of luminance, contrast sensitivity, and sinusoidal gratings on OKN responses in this patient population.
The inclusion of patients with light-perception vision would allow further investigation of how well the model applies to other diagnoses, such as optic neuropathy, end stage glaucoma, and retinal artery occlusions. The reproducibility of OKN testing in individual patients could be studied for multiple testing days and compared to the reproducibility of routinely used measures of central acuity and peripheral VFs that would be performed on each of the testing days.
In conclusion, our results reveal that V max assesses a combination of central VA and peripheral vision. As such, full-field OKN testing may provide potentially useful information on visual function in severely visually impaired patients, who may be candidates for emerging therapeutic initiatives. In practice, the approach developed herein could be used as a new parameter (V max) to evaluate vision, or alternately the model equation could be solved for VA in terms of V max and SF, and thus could be used to estimate VA. OKN testing may be especially useful to test the ability of a retinal prosthesis to drive the retina, because the device can be turned on and off while the OKN responses are recorded.