cerebral visual impairment

Um, I'm Andrea, and I'm very happy today to be joined by Louise Allen.

And Louise is an orthoptist and a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, and is doing some fantastic PhD research into CVI, or cerebral visual impairment.

And welcome, Louise.

It's great to have you here.

And the charity helped me, uh, get in contact with s- some of the parents that could help me with the research.

That's how I, I, um, came in, in touch.

And they were getting a lot of questions about CVI, so we did a lunchtime let's chat session, and the questions went on and it was a really great ...

I learnt a lot, um, as I always do, speaking to parents and trying to answer questions.

Dr. Chang.

You know, your work also combines eye tracking with AI and children with CVI.

Can you tell us a little bit more about your research and what you've been doing recently in your lab?

So as you know, CVI stands for cerebral or cortical visual impairment, and it's one of the leading causes of pediatric visual impairment in the US.

This is where the ocular anatomy may be normal, but there is decreased vision or visual dysfunction due to visual pathways in the brain being affected by things like hydrocephalus, trauma, hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, or prematurity.

And there is no evidence-based medical treatment for CVI, which makes it very difficult for us to know how to best manage these patients in our clinic.

Part of the reason we don't have evidence-based treatment is that we can't even really run clinical trials because we don't have a good outcome measure to measure the severity of CVI because standard pediatric ophthalmology exam techniques don't really capture the higher level visual perceptual problems that kids with CVI have.

So our lab has been using eye tracking to detect various things, including visual attention to higher and lower level visual characteristics using eye tracking.