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Baby Eye Testing

U OF T PROFESSORS DEVISE BETTER WAY TO TEST SIGHT IN BABIES In a darkened room at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, a baby, its head dotted with electrodes, sits in its mother's lap and watches flashing black and white checkerboards and stripes on a television screen. Soon after the test, doctors will know if the child can see and how well it can see. The testing procedure, which involves measuring brain wave activity prompted by visual stimuli (also called visual evoked potentials or VEP's) has been perfected by Drs. Barry Skarf of the Department of Ophthalmology and Moshe Eizenman of U of T's Institute Their procedure is more accurate than tests used elsewhere because Eizenman has developed a novel, real-time computer program to extract brain wave responses from extremely small patterns (similar in size to the bottom line of a standard eye test) which produce much more reliable results. Until now, doctors would have to extrapolate the baby's ability to see small stimuli from test results using large stimuli. "In Effect, Dr. Eizenman has developed a way of looking at brain waves that is more sensitive than methods previously available, " says Skarf. At the HSC, VEP's are used in a number of clinical applications: to determine whether a visual problem is cognitive; to assess whether babies who don't appear to see well will see better in the future; to determine a course of treatment for such problems in which one eye turns in or is weaker than the other eye. The second aspect of the researchers' work involves the development of a stimulator for stereopsis, or binocular vision, which is the fusing of images from both eyes into one picture that has depth. "The problem with testing binocular vision, "...

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