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Block-building performance test using a virtual reality head-mounted display in children with intermittent exotropia
Seung Ah Chung1, Jaewon Choi2, Seungchan Jeong3
1Department of Ophthalmology, Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, South Korea. mingming8@naver.com.
Insights
Children with intermittent exotropia (IXT) show impaired distance divergence and block-building performance in virtual reality. These visuo-motor deficits improved after surgery, suggesting VR tasks can assess IXT-related skill impairments.
Area of Science:
- Ophthalmology
- Pediatric Ophthalmology
- Virtual Reality in Medicine
Background:
- Childhood intermittent exotropia (IXT) is a common strabismus affecting binocular vision.
- Assessing visuo-motor skills in IXT patients is crucial for understanding functional deficits.
- Virtual reality (VR) offers immersive environments for objective performance evaluation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of childhood IXT on distance divergence and block-building task performance using VR.
- To compare the visuo-motor skills of children with IXT to those of healthy controls.
Main Methods:
- Thirty-nine children with IXT and 37 controls (aged 6-12) participated.
- Participants completed a VR block-building task with eye- and hand-tracking.
- Measures included distance divergence, block-building time, and spatial disparities at baseline and 3 months post-surgery.
Main Results:
- Children with IXT demonstrated greater distance divergence and larger spatial disparities in the VR block-building task compared to controls.
- These deficits correlated with the angle of deviation and distance control.
- Post-surgery, IXT patients showed significant improvement in spatial disparities, nearing control levels.
Conclusions:
- VR-based block-building tasks can effectively identify visuo-motor skill deficits in children with IXT.
- The findings support the use of VR for assessing and potentially monitoring functional outcomes in IXT.
- VR offers a promising tool for evaluating the impact of IXT on visual-motor integration.
Purpose:
To determine whether childhood intermittent exotropia (IXT) affects distance divergence and performance in block-building tasks within a virtual reality (VR) environment.
Methods:
Thirty-nine children with IXT, aged 6-12 years, who underwent muscle surgery and 37 normal controls were enrolled. Children were instructed to watch the target moving away and perform a block-building task while fitted with a VR head-mounted display equipped with eye- and hand-movement tracking systems. The change in inter-ocular distance with binocular distance viewing, time to stack five cube blocks of different sizes in order, and distance disparities between the largest and farthest cubes were assessed. All children were evaluated at baseline and 3-month time points.
Results:
The patients with IXT exhibited a larger distance divergence than did controls (p = 0.024), which was associated with greater distance angle of deviation and poorer distance control (r = 0.350, p = 0.001 and r = 0.349, p = 0.004). At baseline, the patients with IXT showed larger distance disparities in the block-building task than did controls in terms of the horizontal, vertical, and 3-dimensional (3-D) measurements (all ps < 0.050). Larger horizontal disparity was associated with greater distance angle of deviation (r = 0.383, p = 0.037). Three months after surgery, the horizontal and 3-D disparities in the patients with IXT improved significantly and were not comparably different compared with controls.
Conclusions:
These preliminary findings suggest that VR-based block-building task may be useful in testing possible deficits in visuo-motor skills associated with childhood IXT.
