Assessment of Reading Performance in Patients With Acrysof IQ Vivity Toric or Non-toric vs Monofocal Acrysof IQ Toric or Non-toric IOL

With increasing demands of patients concerning their visual function after cataract surgery, a variety of advanced technology intraocular lenses (IOL) have become available in the last years. Various developments aim at a reduced spectacle independence for patients after cataract or refractive lens surgery.

Novel technology for providing an extended depth of focus (EDOF) has been developed to account for unmet needs of patients. A novel EDOF IOL, the Acrysof IQ Vivity, has two surface transition elements that work simultaneously by stretching and shifting the wavefront to create a continuous extended focal range instead of multiple focal points.

To assess the performance of such an IOL technology, most studies assess visual acuity at different distances from far, to intermediate up to near. Since most activites with digital devices implicate reading, it is not surprising that reading difficulty is the most common complaint among individuals experiencing visual disturbances with multifocal designs.

Reading ability is usually evaluated using various reading tests that assess reading speed and reading acuity defined as the print size that can stell be read with sufficient speed. However, one of the fundamental problems of these tests is that reading speed is also influenced by the average amount of time that a patient reads as well as the language of the text, whether it is the first or second language.

A novel method to analyse reading performance that appears to be more objective and less reliant on the cognitive abilities of the patient is the observation of the reading pattern using a high-speed eye-tracking system that analyses eye fixations during the reading test. In previous studies we have seen that several aspects of this reading patter, i.e. fixation duration and fixation frequency, appear to correlate with the reading performance overall and can be differentially used to discriminate between cognitive and visuo-motor processing.