2013 World Sight Day: Get your eyes tested, like Charlie does!

World Sight Day is an annual day of awareness held on the second Thursday of October, to focus global attention on blindness and vision impairment. Included on the official World Health Organization calendar, World Sight Day is coordinated by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. This year, it falls on October 10th, and the call to action is: “Get your Eyes Tested”.

Today, 39 million people are blind and a further 246 million people have poor vision that impairs their daily lives. Eighty percent of blindness and vision loss can be either avoided or treated (PDF). To put it another way, 31 million people who are blind do not need to be!

In honor of World Sight Day, we highlight some of our PeerJ Academic Editors experts in the field, as well as recently published PeerJ articles.

Dr. Ingrid Kreissig, PeerJ Academic Editor, is a Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology at the University of Mannheim-Heidelberg, Germany and at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Cornell University, USA. She is a Professor honoris causa for the research she has performed. She has spent a lifetime refining and teaching the minimalized approach to repairing retinal detachments. Today, she shares her personal story and tells us about her dedication to eye surgery. “I wanted to study medicine since childhood but I was living in the DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik] and I was not a child of proletarian origin. Therefore, I had to leave high school and the study of medicine. Was my dream of medicine gone? I am more than grateful that my family went to West Germany–with nothing but the clothes we were wearing… I had to learn and work hard to cope with Western requirements. I eventually got many scholarships and a Fulbright scholarship for the USA, and I finally became an ophthalmologist. I wanted to save or to regain the sight of my patients. I wanted to do something being worthwhile to spend my life on. It was the surgery that I liked the most, and I recognized that the most important was to inflict a minimum of trauma to this precious organ. My work finally resulted in a minimal extraocular surgery for repair of a retinal detachment, a surgery with a minimum of complications and a maximum of regained visual function remaining stable during long-term follow-up. I adore and love my work with my patients so much that now being an Emerita, I try to transfer my knowledge to the next generation, several times per year in various countries during 1- to 2-day teaching courses on this minimal surgery for repair of the detached retina.”

Dr. Suzanne Fleiszig, PeerJ Academic Editor, is a Professor of Vision Science and Optometry, Infectious Diseases & Immunity, and Microbiology, at University of California, Berkeley. We asked her about her research on the eye’s defensive mechanisms: “Current knowledge does not explain why the cornea of the eye is so remarkably resistant to infection. My research program is aimed at understanding the mechanisms involved in this resistance, and why contact lenses wear sometimes compromises it. The ultimate goal is to harness our own defense strategies as a means to prevent infection of the eye and other body sites.”

Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and the Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute. PeerJ Academic Editor, she has also published five articles with us. Today, she comments on “Simultaneous recordings of ocular microtremor and microsaccades with a piezoelectric sensor and a video-oculography system”.

“Our eyes are in continuous motion. Even when we attempt to fix our gaze, we produce minute eye movements, which include microsaccades, drift, and ocular microtremor (OMT). In the 1950s, researchers found that when all eye movements were eliminated in the laboratory, vision faded during gaze fixation. Recent research has related microsaccades to various perceptual phenomena and illusions, but very few studies have focused on OMT, due to its tiny size (∼1 retinal photoreceptor width). Here we recorded OMT and microsaccades simultaneously, and found that microsaccades, but no OMT, can revive the visibility of targets that have faded perceptually during fixation.”

Dr. Kevin Paterson is an Associate Professor at the University of Leicester. Much of this research involves the study of eye movements while reading. His collaboration with Victoria McGowan and Prof. Tim Jordan resulted in the PeerJ article “Effects of adult aging on reading filtered text: evidence from eye movements“.

“People often find they can see text less clearly as they get older. This happens because of often-subtle changes that take place in both the eye and brain, as people get older that affect how well they perceive the world around them. In particular, as people get older they lose sensitivity to fine visual detail. Our research was concerned with the consequences of these age-related changes in visual abilities for how people read. This involved comparing the characteristics of the eye movements of young (18-30 years) and older (65+ years) adults as they read text that had been digitally filtered so that either the fine visual detail was removed and text was displayed as fuzzy blobs, or the text was filtered so that only the fine detail remained. Leaving only fine detail had little effect on the eye movements of young adults, but their reading was slowed considerably when this fine detail was removed and text was fuzzy. In contrast, older readers were disrupted less by fuzzy text than text containing only fine detail. This suggests strongly that older adults have particular difficulty in using fine detail from individual letters and words, and that these older readers may make greater use of overall word shape when working out the identity of words on the page.

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Dr. Steven Woltering is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. We asked him to comment on his PeerJ article “Eye blink correction: a test on the preservation of common ERP components using a regression based technique”.

Here is what he said: “One of the most common problems in processing electroencephalography (EEG) data is dealing with interfering bioelectric activity that isn’t coming from the brain, such as eye blinks. This small methodological paper directly tests the most common regression-based method that aims to correct for interfering eye blink activity and leave brain data intact. Results show that distortion is minimal, with the exception of later brain activity components occurring 500 ms after cognitive processing begins.”

We are grateful to our authors and Academic Editors for their participation in this post. If you would like to see your way to the future of academic publishing, then submit your next article to PeerJ!