Can Short-Term Ocular Dominance Plasticity Provide a General Index to Visual Plasticity to Personalize Treatment in Amblyopia?

Chunwen Tao; Zhifen He; Yiya Chen; Jiawei Zhou; Robert F Hess

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.00625

Can Short-Term Ocular Dominance Plasticity Provide a General Index to Visual Plasticity to Personalize Treatment in Amblyopia?

Front Neurosci. 2020 Jun 26:14:625. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00625. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Chunwen Tao¹, Zhifen He¹, Yiya Chen¹, Jiawei Zhou¹, Robert F Hess²

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology, Optometry and Vision Science, School of Ophthalmology and Optometry and Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, China.
² Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, McGill Vision Research, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.

Abstract

Purpose: Recently, Lunghi et al. (2016) showed that amblyopic eye's visual acuity per se after 2 months of occlusion therapy could be predicted by a homeostatic plasticity, that is, the temporary shift of perceptual eye dominance observed after a 2-h monocular deprivation, in children with anisometropic amblyopia. In this study, we assess whether the visual acuity improvement of the amblyopic eye measured after 2 months of occlusion therapy could be predicted by this plasticity.

Methods: Seven children (6.86 ± 1.46 years old; SD) with anisometropic amblyopia participated in this study. All patients were newly diagnosed and had no treatment history before participating in our study. They finished 2 months of refractive adaptation and then received a 4-h daily fellow eye patching therapy with an opaque patch for a 2-month period. Best-corrected visual acuity of the amblyopic eye was measured before and after the patching therapy. The homeostatic plasticity was assessed by measuring the temporary shift of perceptual eye dominance from 2-h occlusion of the amblyopic eye before treatment. A binocular phase combination paradigm was used for this study.

Results: We found that there was no significant correlation between the temporary shift of perceptual eye dominance observed after 2-h occlusion of the amblyopic eye and the improvement in visual acuity in the amblyopic eye from 2 months of classical patching therapy. This result, although in disagreements with the conclusions of Lunghi et al. involving the short-term patching of the amblyopic eye, is in fact consistent with a reanalysis of Lunghi and colleagues' data.

Conclusion: The short-term changes in perceptual eye dominance as a result of short-term monocular deprivation do not provide an index of cortical plasticity in the general sense such that they are able to predict acuity outcomes from longer-term classical patching.

Keywords: amblyopia; interocular suppression; ocular dominance plasticity; patching therapy; visual acuity.