Abstract
Purpose :
A novel retinal imaging laser eyewear (LEW) scans a narrow laser beam on the retina to enable wearers to see focus-free, full-color images. This LEW is expected to be useful as a visual aid for people with vision impairment. The purpose of this exploratory study is to assess the possibility of the LEW to improve visual ability of ophthalmology patients.
Methods :
Patients who visited the cornea clinic at The University of Tokyo Hospital from May 1st to November 30th, 2017 and met the following criteria, were recruited in this prospective one-group study. The criteria were that subjects were at the age of 20 or over, that the affected eye's visual acuity was reduced due to refractive error or optic media opacity, and that the eye had no retrobulbar disorders. We set the LEW to project various Landolt rings on a subject's retina, the sizes of which on the retina were calculated to be equivalent to those of the conventional Landolt rings. In this setting, we measured each subject's affected eye's laser visual ability (LVA) achieved with the LEW and compared with the uncorrected visual acuity (UVA) and the best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) measured with a conventional Landolt C chart. Next, using the LEW, we had subjects see the real-time image of the room captured by a camera built in the LEW, and collected their feedback. We also evaluated each eye's refractive error and severity of optic media opacity.
Results :
The LEW was tested on 9 eyes of 9 patients with a mean age of 67.6±9.6 years. The mean LVA, UVA, and BCVA were respectively 0.68±0.11, 1.05±0.30, and 0.77±0.30 logMAR. The mean LVA was significantly better than the mean UVA (P=0.001). While LVA was better than BCVA for 5 eyes, 4 of which had no optic media opacity, all the other 4 eyes which couldn't achieve better LVA than BCVA had slight to mild opacity. Only one eye for which LVA was worse than UVA had mild opacity with the least amount of astigmatism in the 9 eyes. There was no significant difference in the amount of the first order aberration between the eyes with better LVA than BCVA and those with worse LVA (P=0.755). Seven patients gave positive feedback, 5 of whom referred to the good contrast and brightness of the image.
Conclusions :
The LEW showed the capability to improve the visual ability of ophthalmology patients regardless of the amount of astigmatism.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.