Individualizing macular displacement measurements based on OCT data for an individual can result in large spatial shifts in the retinal area corresponding to 10-2 locations, which may be important for clinical structure-function analysis when performed on a local, spatial scale.

The perception of motion is considered critical for performing everyday tasks, such as locomotion and driving, and relies on different levels of visual processing. However, it is unclear whether healthy aging differentially affects motion processing at specific levels of processing, or whether performance at central and peripheral spatial eccentricities is altered to the same extent. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of aging on hierarchically different components of motion processing: the minimum displacement of dots to perceive motion (D min ), the minimum contrast and speed to determine the direction of motion, spatial surround suppression of motion, global motion coherence (translational and radial), and biological motion. We measured motion perception in both central vision and at 15° eccentricity, comparing performance in 20 older (60–79 years) and 20 younger (19–34 years) adults. Older adults had significantly elevated thresholds, relative to younger adults, for motion contrast, speed, D min , and biological motion. The differences between younger and older participants were of similar magnitude in central and peripheral vision, except for surround suppression of motion, which was weaker in central vision for the older group, but stronger in the periphery. Our findings demonstrate that the effects of aging are not uniform across all motion tasks. Whereas the performance of some tasks in the periphery can be predicted from the results in central vision, the effects of age on surround suppression of motion shows markedly different characteristics between central and peripheral vision.

Citation: Sepulveda JA, Turpin A, McKendrick AM. Individual differences in foveal shape: feasibility of individual maps between structure and function within the macular region. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2016;57:4772-4778. DOI:10.1167/ iovs.16-19288 PURPOSE. Recently in glaucoma, different mapping schemes to combine structural and functional information within the macula have been proposed. This paper aims to investigate whether the changes in foveal shape parameters are important in the mapping between structure and function within the macular region.METHODS. Twenty younger adults (aged 24-to 33-years old) and 10 older adults (aged 62-to 76-years old) participated. On each subject, four foveally-centered radial spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) scans with 458 of separation between each scan were acquired. After scan acquisition, foveal shape was extracted by fitting a previously proposed model that has been used to customize structure-function mapping in the macular region. Three parameters were obtained from the scans and then compared: the central thickness, the maximum thickness, and the radius.RESULTS. There were significant differences in the foveal shape parameters between subjects. There was no main effect of the scan axis for the central thickness; however, there was an interaction between the scan axis and maximum thickness and between the scan axis and radius. With respect to the effect of age, we did not find a main effect for the central thickness, the maximum thickness or the radius, although this parameter approached statistical significance. CONCLUSIONS.In our study, we demonstrated that the foveal shape is different for different subjects, but predictable superiorly and inferiorly within an individual. Our study highlights features important for the development of individually customized structure-function maps for the investigation of glaucomatous damage in the macular region.