Department of Ophthalmology, Institute for Maternal and Child Health-IRCCS Burlo Garofolo, Trieste, Italy.
Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy.
PLoS One. 2022 Nov 10;17(11):e0277443. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277443. eCollection 2022.
Ocular following eye movements have provided insights into how the visual system of humans and monkeys processes motion. Recently, it has been shown that they also reliably reveal stereoanomalies, and, thus, might have clinical applications. Their translation from research to clinical setting has however been hindered by their small size, which makes them difficult to record, and by a lack of data about their properties in sizable populations. Notably, they have so far only been recorded in adults. We recorded ocular following responses (OFRs)-defined as the change in eye position in the 80-160 ms time window following the motion onset of a large textured stimulus-in 14 school-age children (6 to 13 years old, 9 males and 5 females), under recording conditions that closely mimic a clinical setting. The OFRs were acquired non-invasively by a custom developed high-resolution video-oculography system, described in this study. With the developed system we were able to non-invasively detect OFRs in all children in short recording sessions. Across subjects, we observed a large variability in the magnitude of the movements (by a factor of 4); OFR magnitude was however not correlated with age. A power analysis indicates that even considerably smaller movements could be detected. We conclude that the ocular following system is well developed by age six, and OFRs can be recorded non-invasively in young children in a clinical setting.
眼动追踪是一种研究人类和猴子视觉系统处理运动方式的方法。最近的研究表明，眼动追踪还可以可靠地揭示立体视觉异常，因此可能具有临床应用价值。然而，从研究到临床应用，眼动追踪一直受到其自身小尺寸的限制，这使得它们难以记录，而且关于其在大人群中的特性的数据也很缺乏。值得注意的是，到目前为止，眼动追踪仅在成年人中进行过记录。我们在 14 名学龄儿童（6 至 13 岁，男性 9 名，女性 5 名）中记录了眼动追踪反应（OFR）——即在大纹理刺激运动开始后的 80-160 毫秒时间窗口内眼位的变化，记录条件与临床环境非常相似。OFR 通过我们在本研究中描述的定制高分辨率视频眼动追踪系统进行非侵入性采集。使用开发的系统，我们能够在短记录会话中对所有儿童进行非侵入性检测 OFR。在受试者中，我们观察到运动幅度的很大变异性（相差 4 倍）；然而，OFR 幅度与年龄无关。一项功率分析表明，即使是小得多的运动也可以被检测到。我们得出的结论是，眼动追踪系统在 6 岁时已经发育良好，并且可以在临床环境中对幼儿进行非侵入性的眼动追踪记录。
