Purpose

Visual evoked potential (VEP) recordings for objective visual acuity estimates are typically obtained monocularly with the contralateral eye occluded. Psychophysical studies suggest that the translucency of the occluder has only a minimal effect on the outcome of an acuity test. However, there is literature evidence for the VEP being susceptible to the type of occlusion. The present study assessed whether this has an impact on VEP-based estimates of visual acuity.

Methods

We obtained VEP-based acuity estimates with opaque, non-translucent occlusion of the contralateral eye, and with translucent occlusion that lets most of the light pass while abolishing the perception of any stimulus structure. The tested eye was measured with normal and artificially degraded vision, resulting in a total of 4 experimental conditions. Two different algorithms, a stepwise heuristic and a machine learning approach, were used to derive acuity from the VEP tuning curve.

Results

With normal vision, translucent occlusion resulted in slight, yet statistically significant better acuity estimates when analyzed with the heuristic algorithm (p = 0.014). The effect was small (mean ΔlogMAR = 0.06), not present in some participants, and without practical relevance. It was absent with the machine learning approach. With degraded vision, the difference was tiny and not statistically significant.

Conclusion

The type of occlusion for the contralateral eye does not substantially affect the outcome of VEP-based acuity estimation.

中文翻译：

---

基于 VEP 的视力评估：不受对侧闭塞半透明的影响

目的

用于客观视力估计的视觉诱发电位 (VEP) 记录通常是在对侧眼闭塞的情况下单眼获得的。心理物理学研究表明，封堵器的半透明性对视力测试结果的影响很小。然而，有文献证据表明 VEP 容易受到闭塞类型的影响。本研究评估了这是否对基于 VEP 的视力估计有影响。

方法

我们获得了基于 VEP 的视力评估，对侧眼不透明、非半透明闭塞，半透明闭塞让大部分光线通过，同时消除了对任何刺激结构的感知。被测试的眼睛是用正常和人为退化的视力测量的，总共有4个实验条件。两种不同的算法，逐步启发式算法和机器学习方法，被用于从 VEP 调谐曲线导出敏锐度。

结果

对于正常视力，当使用启发式算法进行分析时，半透明遮挡导致轻微但具有统计学意义的更好的视力估计（p  = 0.014）。影响很小（平均 ΔlogMAR = 0.06），在一些参与者中不存在，并且没有实际相关性。机器学习方法没有它。随着视力下降，差异很小，没有统计学意义。

结论

对侧眼的遮挡类型不会显着影响基于 VEP 的视力估计结果。