Patient‐attentive sequential strategy for perimetry‐based visual field acquisition

Abstract

&NA; Perimetry is a non‐invasive clinical psychometric examination used for diagnosing ophthalmic and neurological conditions. At its core, perimetry relies on a subject pressing a button whenever they see a visual stimulus within their field of view. This sequential process then yields a 2D visual field image that is critical for clinical use. Perimetry is painfully slow however, with examinations lasting 7–8 minutes per eye. Maintaining high levels of concentration during that time is exhausting for the patient and negatively affects the acquired visual field. We introduce PASS, a novel perimetry testing strategy, based on reinforcement learning, that requires fewer locations in order to effectively estimate 2D visual fields. PASS uses a selection policy that determines what locations should be tested in order to reconstruct the complete visual field as accurately as possible, and then separately reconstructs the visual field from sparse observations. Furthermore, PASS is patient‐specific and non‐greedy. It adaptively selects what locations to query based on the patient s answers to previous queries, and the locations are jointly selected to maximize the quality of the final reconstruction. In our experiments, we show that PASS outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods, leading to more accurate reconstructions while reducing between 30% and 70% the duration of the patient examination.