94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or good
Learn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish.
Find out more
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Sensory Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1569282
This article is part of the Research TopicNeuro-Behavioral Insights on Low Vision and BeyondView all 5 articles
Video-evoked neuromarkers of visual function in agerelated macular degeneration
Provisionally accepted
Angela Ingrid Renton1*
David J Klein2Jesse A Livezey2Dan Nemrodov2Stephanie Wolfer2Adam Hanina2
Dimitri Van De Ville1,3- 1Neuro-X Institute, School of Engineering, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Geneva, Switzerland
- 2Dandelion Science Corp, Hoboken, New Jersey, United States
- 3Department of Radiology and Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva,, Geneva, Switzerland
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Neural markers of visual function in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) allow clinicians and researchers to directly evaluate the functional changes in visual processing which occur as a result of the progressive loss of afferent input from the macula. Unfortunately, few protocols exist that elicit such neural markers, and most of these are poorly adapted to AMD. Here, we propose a novel method of embedding frequency tags into full colour and motion videos by periodically manipulating the contrast of visual information of different spatial frequencies at different temporal frequencies. These videos elicit steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPS) in viewers which, when measured using electrophysiological neuroimaging methods, independently represent the responses of populations of neurons tuned to the tagged spatial frequencies. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the SSVEPs of 15 AMD patients and 16 age-matched healthy controls watching a 6-minute series of natural scene videos filtered with this spatial frequency tagging method. Compared with healthy controls, AMD patients showed a lower SSVEP response to high spatial frequency information, and a stronger response to the low spatial frequency information in the video set. The ratio of the SSVEP response to lower relative to higher spatial frequency information was strongly predictive of both visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, and the topographic distributions of these responses suggested retinotopic reorganisation of the neural response to spatial frequency information.
Keywords: Age related macular degeneration (AMD), visual function, Neural marker, frequency tagging, Steady-state visual evoked potentials, Steerable wavelets
Received: 31 Jan 2025; Accepted: 10 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Renton, Klein, Livezey, Nemrodov, Wolfer, Hanina and Van De Ville. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Angela Ingrid Renton, Neuro-X Institute, School of Engineering, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Geneva, Switzerland
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.