[ARTICLE] Visual processing speed in hemianopia patients secondary to acquired brain injury: a new assessment methodology – Full Text

Background

There is a clinical need to identify diagnostic parameters that objectively quantify and monitor the effective visual ability of patients with homonymous visual field defects (HVFDs). Visual processing speed (VPS) is an objective measure of visual ability. It is the reaction time (RT) needed to correctly search and/or reach for a visual stimulus. VPS depends on six main brain processing systems: auditory-cognitive, attentional, working memory, visuocognitive, visuomotor, and executive. We designed a new assessment methodology capable of activating these six systems and measuring RTs to determine the VPS of patients with HVFDs.

Methods

New software was designed for assessing subject visual stimulus search and reach times (S-RT and R-RT respectively), measured in seconds. Thirty-two different everyday visual stimuli were divided in four complexity groups that were presented along 8 radial visual field positions at three different eccentricities (10^o, 20^o, and 30^o). Thus, for each HVFD and control subject, 96 S- and R-RT measures related to VPS were registered. Three additional variables were measured to gather objective data on the validity of the test: eye-hand coordination mistakes (ehcM), eye-hand coordination accuracy (ehcA), and degrees of head movement (dHM, measured by a head-tracker system). HVFD patients and healthy controls (30 each) matched by age and gender were included. Each subject was assessed in a single visit. VPS measurements for HFVD patients and control subjects were compared for the complete test, for each stimulus complexity group, and for each eccentricity.

Results

VPS was significantly slower (p < 0.0001) in the HVFD group for the complete test, each stimulus complexity group, and each eccentricity. For the complete test, the VPS of the HVFD patients was 73.0% slower than controls. They also had 335.6% more ehcMs, 41.3% worse ehcA, and 189.0% more dHMs than the controls.

Conclusions

Measurement of VPS by this new assessment methodology could be an effective tool for objectively quantifying the visual ability of HVFD patients. Future research should evaluate the effectiveness of this novel method for measuring the impact that any specific neurovisual rehabilitation program has for these patients.

Vision is the dominant sensory function in humans because visual search and reach tasks are crucial to efficient performance of the main activities of daily life [1, 2]. The term visual processing speed (VPS), an important variable of visual sensory function, is the amount of time needed to make a correct interaction with a visual stimulus [3, 4]. The term correct interaction is the effective realization of a complete executive action of visual search and reach [5], e.g., visualizing a glass of water placed on a table and then grasping it by precise eye-hand coordination (EHC). Accordingly, the VPS variable defines the global reaction time (RT) that is composed of two additive RT sub-variables: search reaction time (S-RT) and reach reaction time (R-RT) [6,7,8]. Furthermore, VPS is mainly interdependent on intrinsic visual cognitive processing mechanisms, the complexity of the determined stimulus to be recognized (defined principally in terms of size, contrast, semantic content, and number of traces or interior angles [9, 10]), the number of distractor stimuli surrounding it, and the distance from the point of fixation to the particular stimulus that the person is tasked to identify (eccentricity) [4, 11,12,13]. Thus, VPS is a quantifiable parameter that objectively reflects a subject’s global visual ability.

Recent findings in the field of visual psychophysics show that having adequate VPS is necessary and dependent upon the proper functioning of six main brain-processing systems: auditory-cognitive, attentional, working-memory, visuocognitive, visuomotor, and executive [14,15,16,17,18]. Consequently, an acquired brain injury (ABI) that affects any of these cerebral processing systems could decrease the VPS.

ABI is one of the most important and disabling public health problems of our era due to the high incidence and prevalence [19]. Following an ABI, between 30 and 85% of patients will experience some type of visual dysfunction [20, 21], especially homonymous visual field defects (HVFDs) secondary to lesions involving the visual afferent pathways posterior to the chiasm [22]. Eye tracking technology has shown that HVFDs prevent patients from having the appropriate control of their oculomotor systems [23,24,25,26]. This is especially apparent in the saccadic system, because it is interdependent with the covert attention mechanisms associated with peripheral vision [27, 28]. Thus, patients with HVFDs tend to perform search tasks using unconscious compensatory head movements [25, 29, 30] and employ longer total search times, more frequent fixations, and shorter saccades than normal controls [23, 31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. Therefore, these patients experience a significant reduction in their quality of life and functional independence. They complain that the time they have to invest in carrying out their daily activities is much greater than before suffering from HVFDs [33, 38,39,40]. In this regard, in recent years the scientific community has joined efforts to develop increasingly effective neurovisual rehabilitation training programs (NVRTPs) for these patients [41]. Different forms of NVRTPs have been developed, including compensatory NVRTP (C-NVRTP), restitution NVRTP (R-NVRTP), and substitution NVRTP (S-NVRTP) [41,42,43,44].[…]