This prospective study found that the Moorefield’s Motion Displacement Test is a reliable tool for detecting structurally and clinically defined glaucoma. The test’s portability, accessibility, relative affordability and good diagnostic performance suggest its potential as a new glaucoma diagnostic tool.
The Moorefield’s Motion Displacement Test is a new 31-point suprathreshold test for visual field assessment using moving line stimuli displayed on a standard laptop computer. The major advantage of this test is that it is rapid, usually lasting less than two minutes, requires no refractive correction, and shows greater resilience to the effects of additional stray light from media opacities.
The authors evaluated the test’s diagnostic ability in 78 subjects with glaucoma and 348 healthy subjects. All tests were performed on both eyes if eligibility criteria were fulfilled, but only the right eye was used for analysis.
The area under the curve for the global probability of true damage was 0.093 (95 percent confidence interval) for diagnosing glaucoma. At 85 percent specificity, the test had a sensitivity of 88.5 percent. This decreased to 83.3 percent at 95 percent specificity.
At the global probability of true damage cutoff point value of 2.0, the sensitivity was 85.9 percent and the specificity 94.5 percent. Thus the test showed good diagnostic performance for diagnosing glaucoma when glaucoma was defined by structural criteria (nerve damage).
The test’s ability to detect early glaucoma was equivalent to that of other more commonly used investigative methods, including Humphrey Matrix Perimeter, Stratus OCT and retinal nerve fiber layer photography. Many patients in whom standard perimetry has proved difficult may be well served by this innovative test.
The authors note that the test’s performance was also reasonable in discriminating eyes with borderline structural characteristics of glaucoma. These findings indicate that it potentially could be used to detect glaucomatous visual field loss with performance levels comparable with those achieved by full-threshold test strategies used in conventional automated perimetry.