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medRxiv
MEDRXIV
medRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

10.1101/2024.08.22.24312443
preprint
1
Article
Glaucoma classification through SSVEP derived ON- and OFF-pathway features
Scott Martin T.W. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9863-0577

Xu Hui
Yakovleva Alexandra
Tibshirani Robert
Goldberg Jeffrey L http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1390-7360

Norcia Anthony M
22 8 2024
2024.08.22.24312443https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
http://medrxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/2024.08.22.24312443
nihpp-2024.08.22.24312443.pdf
Recent evidence from small animal models and human electrophysiology suggests that the OFF-pathway is more vulnerable to glaucomatous insult than the ON-pathway. Thus, OFF-pathway based measurements of visual function may be useful in the diagnosis of Glaucoma. The steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) can be used to non-invasively make such functional measurements. Here, we examine whether OFF- and ON-pathway biasing SSVEP measurements differently predict glaucoma diagnosis using a large cohort of 98 glaucoma patients and 71 controls. Using both a logistic regression with k-fold cross-validation and a random forest classifier, we show that OFF-pathway biasing features produce a small improvement in predictive accuracy over ON-pathway biasing features. However, despite our inclusion of many more response features and the retention of both participants' eyes, our classifier did not perform as well as previous reports that used the isolated-check VEP. This is likely a result of the relatively small amount of data we collected for each participant, but may also be explained by the absence of any train-test splitting in preexisting work. Nevertheless, our results support further exploration of the diagnostic potential of OFF-pathway biasing functional biomarkers for glaucoma.
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pmc
