Evaluation of the precision of contrast sensitivity function assessment on a tablet device

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 7; no. 1; p. 46706
• Main Authors: Dorr, Michael, Lesmes, Luis A., Elze, Tobias, Wang, Hui, Lu, Zhong-Lin, Bex, Peter J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 21.04.2017; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/378/2613/2615; 692/53/2421; Acuity; Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Algorithms; Binocular vision; Contrast Sensitivity - physiology; Emmetropia - physiology; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Information retrieval; Interactive computer systems; Laboratories; Middle Aged; multidisciplinary; Myopia - physiopathology; Probability distribution; Reproducibility of Results; Science; Vision Tests - instrumentation; Vision Tests - methods; Visual Acuity - physiology; Visual perception; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep46706

The contrast sensitivity function (CSF) relates the visibility of a spatial pattern to both its size and contrast, and is therefore a more comprehensive assessment of visual function than acuity, which only determines the smallest resolvable pattern size. Because of the additional dimension of contrast, estimating the CSF can be more time-consuming. Here, we compare two methods for rapid assessment of the CSF that were implemented on a tablet device. For a single-trial assessment, we asked 63 myopes and 38 emmetropes to tap the peak of a “sweep grating” on the tablet’s touch screen. For a more precise assessment, subjects performed 50 trials of the quick CSF method in a 10-AFC letter recognition task. Tests were performed with and without optical correction, and in monocular and binocular conditions; one condition was measured twice to assess repeatability. Results show that both methods are highly correlated; using both common and novel measures for test-retest repeatability, however, the quick CSF delivers more precision with testing times of under three minutes. Further analyses show how a population prior can improve convergence rate of the quick CSF, and how the multi-dimensional output of the quick CSF can provide greater precision than scalar outcome measures.