ViFT: Visual field transformer for visual field testing via deep reinforcement learning

Visual field testing (perimetry) quantifies a patient’s visual field sensitivity to diagnosis and follow-up on their visual impairments. Visual field testing would require the patients to concentrate on the test for a long time. However, a longer testing time makes patients more exhausted and leads to a decrease in testing accuracy. Thus, it is helpful to develop a well-designed strategy to finish the testing more quickly while maintaining high accuracy. This paper proposes the visual field transformer (ViFT) for visual field testing with deep reinforcement learning. This study contributes to the following four: (1) ViFT can fully control the visual field testing process. (2) ViFT learns the relationships of visual field locations without any pre-defined information. (3) ViFT learning process can consider the patient perception uncertainty. (4) ViFT achieves the same or higher accuracy than the other strategies, and half as test time as the other strategies. Our experiments demonstrate the ViFT efficiency on the 24-2 test pattern compared with other strategies.