Clinical Implementation of the Motion Diamond Stimulus

Eye disease and related conditions represent a very serious public health issue affecting the quality of life for 253 million people globally (2018 World Health Organization). Recent technological advances have led to procedures that can identify physiological and genetic underpinnings of some vision related clinical conditions (Tuo et al. 2004). Such procedures may prove to be extraordinarily important in the care and treatment of patients, however, they do not measure a patient’s ability to see nor do the measure how the progression of a disease leads to changes in patient’s visual world. Functional tests (such as eye charts) are central for clinical assessment because they can indicate whether the patients have problems seeing (most patients present to clinic because self-identified visual difficulties), and because they can indicate whether drug and surgical treatments have been successful. Most clinicians however have few functional tests at their disposal and these functional tests offer a relatively coarse assessment of a patient’s visual abilities. It is our goal therefore to develop tests for visual function that allow for early detection of a disease, tracking the progression of the disease, differentiating between types of visual deficits, and evaluating the effectiveness of treatments. In my dissertation, I will use a recently developed stimulus configuration (the Motion Diamond Stimulus, or MDS, Flynn Shapiro, 2015, in press; Nigam, Shapiro 2017) to investigate Central Serous Chorioretinopathy (CSC) and Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD).