Visual Field Patterns in a Large Sample of People with Retinitis Pigmentosa

Purpose: Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is a well-documented retinal degeneration. However, there have been few systematic evaluations of the patterns of visual field (VF) loss of people with RP. We applied unsupervised machine learning to a large sample to calculate representative patterns of RP related VF loss.Methods: VFs were measured using the 30-2 and 30/60-1 patterns of the Humphrey Field Analyzer. We analyzed 138 VF locations (combining the two patterns) from 411 eyes from 214 patients (aged 18 to 55 years) using Mixture of Gaussian Clustering, which is a probabilistic cluster analysis method. The data set was partitioned into K different subsets (" clusters") in which the similarity within each cluster was higher than the similarity between the clusters. An optimal set of representative clusters was determined by the Bayesian Information Criterion, a conservative criterion to prevent" overfit"(too many …