VR Treatment for Lazy Eye

1point618 writes "According to an article at the BBC, scientist have found a new way to correct amblyopia, or lazy eye, using a virtual reality system. The system works by giving some stimuli to the good eye, but more important stimuli to the bad eye, making it work harder to get stronger while keeping both eyes in use so as not to produce double vision. Supposedly, the system will do in 1 hour what used to take 400 hours, but I'd stay skeptical of such a claim until there is a peer-reviewed paper out."

0o

[ExE122]

One thing this article doesn't mention is the age of the patients. I know the amblyopia can be treated more easily when caught at an early age, when the eye is still maturing. So I think this would be an important factor to note in their statistics. A friend of mine had lazy eye when he was younger and was successfully treated with a week of wearing an eye patch and some atropine drops. But I'm thinking it would take a little more than that to help out Thom Yorke and Dr. Evil.

I'm also curious as to what type of amblyopia this treats. Is the treatment equally effective for lazy eye caused by nearsight, farsight, astygmatism, and strabismus? If so, couldn't this also become a treatment for any of those on their own? I'm slightly nearsighted, and my optomotrist explained it to me as my eyes being too lazy to focus correctly. I wonder if I could just give them a little VR workout every now and then to beef them up...

Is there an eye doctor in the house?

--
"Man Bites Dog
Then Bites Self"

This is news?

[Kenja]

I knew about this way back in the mid 90s when I was working with stereoscopic LCD shutter glassses. Forcing both eyes to work at the same rate corrects the problem of one eye being favored. The down side is that untill your eyes are corrected you will be NASTY head aches from using such devices.

Much simpler solution from 30 years ago

[Animats]

There's a much simpler solution from about thirty years ago. The patient is given polarized glasses with different polarization axes for each eye, and a matching screen with two polarizers to be placed in front of a TV. This turns TV viewing into an eye exercise. Cheap and simple.

As a strabismus sufferer...

[nvrrobx]

...I'd be interested to see if this actually pans out. Patching is what caused my lazy eye to become as bad as it is.

I've had corrective surgery for my strabismus three times, and each time has made significant improvements, but most of my vision still comes from my one good eye. I'm one of the lucky ones - I have a good null point, so my eyes don't bounce all the time. I can drive just fine. :)

BTW, the medical term for lazy eye is actually occular nystagmus.

Re:0o

[EggyToast]

It seems like the treatment simply addresses strength problems between the eyes. If poor vision caused the eyes to have different strength, then I don't see why not. Obviously you would have to wear contacts or have the vision in each eye corrected before using this method.

But definitely it would be easier to be done at an early age, as after puberty there's really no way to easily create neural pathways to the brain. It's the same reason why it's easy for kids to learn languages, yet more difficult for adults. I'm sure it could assist amblyopia in adults, but it would probably be impossible to cure it.

But if your eyes individually are having problems, then I don't think this treatment would address that. It seems to focus on differences between the eyes, versus any inherent weakness in a single eye individually.

The old method couldn't be much worse

[ianscot]

Any more direct method that was at all effective couldn't help but be a dramatic improvement over eye patches for hours a day.

The Docs consulted prescribed the usual regimen of eye patches and so on for my daughter as a quite young child. I can say from experience that it's not easy to get a child of that age -- and treatment when young was strongly preferable -- to live with the patch. Even when she wasn't particularly annoyed by it, we were dealing with something on the level of brushing your teeth in a little kid. My parenting skills weren't up to the task, and our treatment was hit and miss.

Eventually my daughter's lazy eye has come around by itself, more or less. I'd much rather have been able to intervene with a more active measure, though.

Younger Patients Only..

[AWhiteFlame]

I have a non-muscular lazy eye and after reading the article I'm still convinced this is just for the younger set, Age 12, when the recommend patching the good idea to force the weak eye to work harder. Unfortunately I was only taken to an eye doctor at the age of about 12 so the patching never really worked for me. I'd be surprised of this would actually do anything for the older set.

Re:0o

[outsider007]

they way my eye doctor explained it to me, the pathways between your eye and brain are softwired until you're 7 or 8, and after that there's no way to correct it.

First hand experience.

[Eric Damron]

I was diagnosed with amblyopia at the age five. They tried making me wear a patch over my good eye to force my bad eye to work harder but it was too late. Amblyopia must be caught at a VERY early age or nothing helps.

It's really a weird condition. I can force myself to see out of my lazy eye but normally I don't. For example when I read I only see the words in my good eye and if I try to read with my lazy eye it's like I can see the words but can't recognize them. Weird. The last time I took an eye exam to renew my driver's license they had one of those machines that shows different letters to each eye. I read off the line I saw and the officer asked "Are you blind in one eye?" I said "No, why" and he said "Because you read every other letter." I didn't even see the letters being shown to my lazy eye.

Left eye, right eye

[syntap]

I wish there was a quick way to change your eye-edness. I am right handed but left-eyed, and tasks that require aiming (like darts, shooting, etc) are handicapped.

Re:0o

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Optometrist, i am very sceptical... the Tool could be nice to use in the treatment but you don't make the brain work that fast. the result may be short lived. All the previous points are accurate. Age has a LARGE factor as well as the underlying cause.

Re:0o

[fshalor]

That eye-patch treatment started a downward spiral in both eyes which has me with:
1. a bad perscription in both eyes
2. loss of color definition in my left (good) eye
3. inability to wear contacts for extended periods
4. occasional eye twitches in lazy eye when overused
5. inability to use right eye in viewfinders, sights, etc. (have to shoot rifles left handed)

As soon as the treatment was over, I went from 20/20 to loosing my distance vision. I never got back the color response in my left (good) eye. now.

The only thing that helped a lot resently was RTCW. ... hehe. I played quite seriously for about a year. Did wonders!

I'm doubly-lazy!

[duffhuff]

I think I actually have two lazy eyes, probably brought on at an early age by nearsightedness and / or astigmatism. I believe the explanation I recieved was that the muscles on one side of the eye are stronger then the other side, and the eye gets pulled out of alignment in certain situations. I had surgury on one eye to mitigate the effects, but I still have the symptoms which cause all kinds of wierd effects for me, as I will try to explain.

I can, at will, cause either one of my eyes to break convergence and look somewhere else and then alternate which eye is lazy by "looking" out the other eye. That "lazy" eye will then start looking outward and I'll get double vision, but how noticable it is depends on how out-of-whack my eye convergence is (I can also control how much convergence I loose, so I can go from slight, almost overlapping double vision, to nearly completely different viewpoints). If I'm looking at something to the extreme right or left I usually end up looking with just one eye, but I don't notice the double-vision for some reason. I've since learned to physically turn my head / body towards what I'm looking at since that makes it physically possible for me to look at something with both eyes. Another trick I use is to look at something with my "outside eye" (i.e. if I'm looking at something to my right, I will look at it with my left eye, visa-versa if looking left). I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but AFAIK, most people should be able to "look" through either of their eyes at will. Over time, I've managed to adapt my behaviour so that most of the time these symptoms don't occur.

The most dangerous downsides to all this is that when I get extremely tired, or very drunk, I can no longer keep my eyes converged and normal vision becomes impossible. Nothing short of intensely focusing on a high-contrast area (say, the sharp edge of a table) will bring convergence back. However, I'm not sure if this happens because of my lazy eyes, or if it happens to other people. Driving while tired is extremely dangerous for me, especially at night, since I loose all sense of depth perception when I get double-vision and I suddenly have no idea which lane I'm in or where I'm headed.

One interesting aspect about all this is that if I cover one eye then I can no longer get this behaviour to happen, which has saved me a few times during extremely boring lectures! Something about looking with both eyes causes the trouble.

Re:0o

[smellsofbikes]

I'm not an eye doctor but my girlfriend is. I'll try and sum up what I've learned. Farsightedness and nearsightedness are both problems with the lens or cornea's radius of curvature (not enough or too much); astigmatism is a problem with the lens or cornea having two different radii of curvature -- in other words, it's somewhere between hemispherical and cylindrical, so you have a major axis and a minor axis of curvature. Imagine an elliptic lens, basically. Amblyopia is, to the best of my knowledge, a problem with the muscles that control the eye or with the brain's ability to work with the details it's getting, so it has nothing to do with the lens and cornea, which determine near/far/astigmatism. If the brain cannot, for whatever reason, make images from the two eyes fuse into one, it'll start to ignore one eye and that eye will start tracking poorly. Likewise, if the muscles that control that eye are asymmetric, it will track poorly and the brain will begin to ignore it, so it'll wander more. There are three pairs of muscles that move each eye, sort of hexagonally spaced, and they can be of different strength. That can be corrected surgically or (as in article) optically, with differing rates of success, and for some people, specially cut glasses will provide excellent tracking but if the person is very tired or removes the glasses, the eyes will stop tracking together fairly quickly. Pardon me, ophthalmic doctors out there, if I'm grossly wrong.

nice to have hope!

[easytoplease]

i have amblyopia in my left eye and had it treated when i was 4 (am now 24), and there is also some astigmatism. additionally, that eye is far-sighted, while the right eye is near-sighted. it's still not corrected and i wonder sometimes if it ever will be. i cannot do anything with my left eye because it is so weak. i hope that someday this type of treatment will be a viable option as it's really a very annoying problem to have.

Re:As a strabismus sufferer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's get our terminology straight.

Nystagmus is something different. It's a neurological sign exhibited by a rapidly repeated movement of an eye in a certain direction. It often indicates neurological injury.

Amblyopia is a condition caused by having a lazy eye ("exotropia") that wasn't corrected early enough causing deteriorating vision in the weak eye.

Exotropia is what people commonly refer to as a "lazy eye" which is most often caused by muscular weakness of eye muscles. (Esotropia is similar, but causing inward drifting of the eye, making you appear "cross-eyed")

And yes, IAAD (I am a doctor :).