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AimTo examine the level of agreement among nine clinicians in assessing progressive deterioration in visual field (VF) overview using three different methods of analysis. Methods Each visual field was assessed by Humphrey Field Analyzer (HFA), program 24-2 SITA Standard. Nine expert clinicians assessed the progression status of each series by using HFA 'overview printouts' (HFA OP), the Guided Progression Analysis (GPA) and the Guided Progression Analysis (GPA2). VF series were presented in random order, but each patient's VF remained in chronological order within a given field series. Each clinician adopted his personal methods based on his knowledge to evaluate VF progression. The level of agreement between the clinicians was evaluated by using weighted k statistics.Results A total of 303 tests, comprising 38 visual field series of 7.963.4 tests (mean6SD), were assessed by the nine glaucoma specialists. When the intra-observer agreement was evaluated between HFA OP and GPA, the mean k statistic was 0.5860.13, between HFA OP and GPA2, k was 0.5560.06 and between GPA and GPA2 it was 0.5660.17. When the inter-observer agreement was analysed k statistic was 0.65 for HFA OP, 0.54 for GPA and 0.70 for GPA2. Conclusions Using any procedure for evaluating the progression of a series of VF, agreement between expert clinicians is moderate. Clinicians had higher agreement when GPA2 was used, followed by HFA OP and GPA printouts, but these differences were not significant.

The GPS showed similar sensitivity and specificity to the Mikelberg and Bathija formulas; this method is a promising one for differentiating between healthy and glaucomatous eyes, requiring no subjective user input.

Blindness is an ideal condition to study the role of visual input on the development of spatial representation, as studies have shown how audio space representation reorganizes in blindness. However, how spatial reorganization works is still unclear. A limitation of the study on blindness is that it is a “stable” system and it does not allow for studying the mechanisms that subtend the progress of this reorganization. To overcome this problem here we study, for the first time, audio spatial reorganization in 18 adults with macular degeneration (MD) for which the loss of vision due to scotoma is an ongoing progressive process. Our results show that the loss of vision produces immediate changes in the processing of spatial audio signals. In individuals with MD, the lateral sounds are “attracted” toward the central scotoma position resulting in a strong bias in the spatial auditory percept. This result suggests that the reorganization of audio space representation is a fast and plastic process occurring also later in life, after vision loss.