00.00 Long
shot Durham University Stockton Campus across river
CU
Durham University Sign
CU
Wolfson Institute sign
Ext
Wolfson Institute
CU
eye on screen
Man’s
field of vision being measured
Hemianopia
field of vision illustrated
Guide Voice: Over the last year
researchers at Durham University’s Wolfson Research Institute
have been examining a condition called Hemianopia which is a
partial blindness caused by damage to the primary visual
cortex.
It's commonly the result of a stroke, and of the
150,000 people a year in the UK alone who suffer some form of
stroke, 20% of them will be left with a visual deficit, like
Hemianopia.
While it's not total blindness, it’s a very
disabling condition, which can leave patients unable to see
anything in as much as half of their field of vision, so they have
difficulty in locating things, have problems reading and coping
with traffic on the street, and are generally disoriented.
00.38 SOT (out of vision) Alison
Lane,Researcher, Durham University points finger to Hemianopia
field of vision - “This is a typical field of vision for
a patient with Hemianopia this is the area of residual vision and
this is the blind field.”
Images: Woman
picks blocks
Researcher
watching with stopwatch
Guide Voice: The Cognitive
Neuroscience Research team has been developing and testing ways of
training Hemianopia patients to use their residual vision in
different ways to enable them to cope better with the
condition.
00.59 SOT: Dr Thomas Schenk, Senior Lecturer,
Dept of Pyschology, Durham
University -“It's impossible to cure that
condition, it's impossible to actually repair the brain damage,
it's impossible to restore the vision, but what we can do is we can
actually help them to use their preserved vision in a more
efficient way to actually compensate for the partial blindness by
making efficient eye movements, and using their eyes to explore
their visual environment and thereby avoid bumping into obstacles,
being able to monitor traffic and also being able to read
again.”
Images: CU
Eye
Exercises
projected on wall
Woman
presses Yes/No choices
Guide Voice: At the moment there is
no specific treatment for Hemianopia available on the NHS, but Dr
Schenk’s team are developing new methods of training
patients, with the aim of offering a consistently effective
treatment for the condition which could bemade widely
available.
What they are primarily interested in is improving
the patients ability to make eye movements by scanning their
environment with the functioning remnant of their sight, to look
into the dark areas, which while it might seem obvious does not
come naturally to patients
01.55 SOT Dr Daniel Smith, Researcher, Dept
of Psychology, Durham University -“The typical
pattern you see with a hemianopic patient is that their eye
movements are very small and they don’t actually make eye
movements into their blind field, now if you or I went blind you
would think you would move your eyes into the blind field
which would allow more of the world into your seeing field seems
like an obvious strategy, these patients don’t do this and
they need to be taught how to do this and that is what the purpose
of this training programme is.”
Images: WS
CU Man puts mask on
Then
arm between objects
Series
of different eye training exercises
Guide Voice: The training programme designed by
the team is aimed at teaching patients to use their residual sight
to make fewer but larger scans of their environment, drawing up an
overview that will help them avoid bumping into objects and orient
themselves when they arrive in a new place, which could radically
improve the quality of life of a Hemianopia sufferer.
Different programmes are designed to teach patients to scan
their visual field in different ways, in all the training programme
is designed to take a total of fifteen hours, which means it could
be made widely available.
The next step is gathering a sample of fifty patients on whom
the tests will be perfected, and who will be studied in their home
environment after the tests to see how effective they are
overall.
03.00 SOT Thomas Schenk - “The next
phase for me is to show that the training which has been shown to
work very well in the lab goes beyond the lab and that it actually
does help patients in their domestic environment in their work
environment and in short it helps in their real life. We also want
to make sure that the training is now developed into such an
efficient sequence of exercises that the patient can actually do
that training at home and this would ensure that it can be offered
to a much larger number of patients than is currently the
case.”
03.30
Ends
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