Visual evoked potential-based assessment of functional vision via natural stimulus perception

The project will be carried out at the Visual Processing Laboratory of the Ophthalmic Department in the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany, supervised by Prof. M.B. Hoffmann. 

Personal Background and Interest:

I am an optometrist from India. I obtained my bachelor’s degree from the Elite School of Optometry in 2019 during which I worked in electrophysiology- Visually evoked potentials (VEP) and Electroretinogram (ERG) during my bachelor's. Following that, I did my master's at Manipal Academy of Higher Education and received my degree in the year 2021. For my master thesis, I worked on investigating the Blur perception in Myopes, Emmetropes, and Subjects who underwent Refractive surgery. Following my summer schooling in 2020 at Neuromatch academy, I have also been working remotely in some computational works in collaboration with the Orthogonal Lab.

Research Interest:  

Psychophysics, electrophysiology, and computational neuroscience.

Aim of the project:

During clinical routine, functional vision testing shows disadvantages of employing less-engaging stimuli and relying on subjective responses, which are strong confounds in particular in patient or pediatric populations. With the use of objective readouts of neural brain responses, I try to overcome these challenges. Therefore, the objective of my project is to develop a new tool to test functional vision using natural stimuli (based on Visual Evoked Potentials (VEP) signatures of endogenous attention) for low-demand and enjoyable objective visual function testing.

Current activities:

I am planning to set-up a paradigm of comparative acuity estimations, including psychophysical measures and electrophysiological measures such as the acuity-VEP and P300-based paradigms. After testing and establishing the paradigm in adults, it will be used for children testing.

To date, I have performed a pilot test comparing visual acuity measurements based on VEP, subjective visual acuity, and EEG and also a case based visual acuity estimation in amblyopes. This required optimizing the visual stimulation, the recording approaches and the data analysis tools. I am currently looking into which method properties cause the difference in visual acuity estimates between the three methods. I am also working on the probable reasons and the reliability, in terms of visual acuity estimation, of applying these methods to patients with amblyopia.

Future directions:

In the future I hope to apply these methods to other patient populations with visual impairments, such as nystagmus and optic neuritis.