Renton Angela I, Klein David J, Livezey Jesse A, Nemrodov Dan, Wolfer Stephanie, Hanina Adam, Van De Ville Dimitri
Neuro-X Institute, School of Engineering, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Geneva, Switzerland.
Dandelion Science Corp, Hoboken, NJ, United States.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2025 May 1;19:1569282. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1569282. eCollection 2025.
Neural markers of visual function in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) allow clinicians and researchers to directly evaluate the functional changes in visual processing which occur as a result of the progressive loss of afferent input from the macula. Unfortunately, few protocols exist that elicit such neural markers, and most of these are poorly adapted to AMD. Here, we propose a novel method of embedding frequency tags into full color and motion videos by periodically manipulating the contrast of visual information of different spatial frequencies at different temporal frequencies. These videos elicit steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPS) in viewers which, when measured using electrophysiological neuroimaging methods, independently represent the responses of populations of neurons tuned to the tagged spatial frequencies. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the SSVEPs of 15 AMD patients and 16 age-matched healthy controls watching a 6-min series of natural scene videos filtered with this spatial frequency tagging method. Compared with healthy controls, AMD patients showed a lower SSVEP to high spatial frequency information, and a stronger response to the low spatial frequency information in the video set. The ratio of the SSVEP to lower relative to higher spatial frequency information was strongly predictive of both visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, and the topographic distributions of these responses suggested retinotopic reorganization of the neural response to spatial frequency information.
年龄相关性黄斑变性（AMD）中视觉功能的神经标志物使临床医生和研究人员能够直接评估由于黄斑传入输入逐渐丧失而导致的视觉处理功能变化。不幸的是，很少有方案能够引出此类神经标志物，而且其中大多数对AMD的适应性较差。在此，我们提出一种新方法，即通过在不同时间频率下周期性地操纵不同空间频率视觉信息的对比度，将频率标签嵌入全彩色和动态视频中。这些视频能在观看者中引出稳态视觉诱发电位（SSVEPs），当使用电生理神经成像方法进行测量时，这些电位独立代表了调谐到标记空间频率的神经元群体的反应。我们使用脑电图（EEG）记录了15名AMD患者和16名年龄匹配的健康对照观看一系列经这种空间频率标记方法滤波的6分钟自然场景视频时的SSVEPs。与健康对照相比，AMD患者对高空间频率信息的SSVEP较低，而对视频集中低空间频率信息的反应更强。较低空间频率信息与较高空间频率信息的SSVEP比值强烈预测了视力和对比敏感度，并且这些反应的地形图分布表明对空间频率信息的神经反应存在视网膜拓扑重组。
