Final project: Markov chains in continuous time


Field tests for Glaucoma

Glaucoma is a disease of the eyes that affects old people. One of the symptoms of this disease is a loss of periferal vision and a narrowing of the patients field of vision. Patients who have Glaucoma thus undergo regular visual field tests in order to monitor the progress of the disease. When a person undergoes a field test their head is placed in a machine that resembles a urinal with one eye blindfolded. The patient stares at an led in the center of the machine, while short and sharp burst appear at various points in the remainder of the machine. The patient must then push a button whenever s/he sees one of these bursts of light.
  • Write a program that could be used to control where and when the points of light are generated inside a machine for performing field tests and how bright they are. Explain how your program addresses the fact that people are primed to recognize regular repeating patterns in the intervals between events when there are repeated stimuli. This is a problem for field tests as people's subconciouses might lead them to see lights that simply are not there if the timing between each light being generated is too regular.
  • Write a program that is able to simulate the patients response (pressing the button) in repsonse to each of the light pulses generated by your program. Discuss what experiments you would need to do on patients in order to determine how to set the parameters in your algorithm for generating light pulses.

Contact Details

School of Mathematics and Physics,
Queen's University Belfast,
Belfast,
BT7 1NN

Email: g.tribello@qub.ac.uk
Website: mywebsite