TY  - JOUR
ID  - guenther2009atreatment
T1  - A Treatment Outcome Prediction Model of Visual Field Recovery Using Self-Organizing-Maps
A1  - Günther, Tobias
A1  - Müller, Iris
A1  - Preuss, Markus
A1  - Kruse, Rudolf
A1  - Sabel, Bernhard
JA  - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
Y1  - 2009
VL  - 56
IS  - 3
SP  - 572
EP  - 581
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19068421
M2  - doi: 10.1109/TBME.2008.2009995
N2  - Brain injuries caused by stroke, trauma or tumor often affect the visual system which leads to perceptual deficits. After intense visual stimulation of the damaged visual field or its border region, recovery may be achieved in some sectors of the visual field, but the extent of restoration is highly variable between patients and it is not homogeneously distributed in the visual field. We now assessed the visual field loss and its dynamics by perimetry, a standard diagnostic procedure in medicine, to measure the detectability of visual stimuli in the visual field. Subsequently, a treatment outcome prediction model (TOPM) was developed, using features which were extracted from the baseline perimetric charts. The features in the TOPM were either empirically associated with treatment outcomes or were based on findings in the vision-restoration literature. Among other classifiers, the Self-Organizing-Map (SOM) was selected because it implicitly supports data exploration. Using a data pool of 52 patients with visual field defects, the TOPM was constructed to predict areas of improvement in the visual-field topography. To evaluate the predictive validity of the TOPM, we propose a method to calculate the Receiver-Operating-Characteristic graph, whereby the SOM is used in combination with a nearest-neighbor classifier. We discuss issues relevant for medical TOPMs, such as appropriateness to the patient sample, clinical relevance, and incorporation of a priori knowledge.
ER  -