Quantitative evaluation of anisometropic amblyopia treatment efficacy by coupling multiple visual functions via CRITIC algorithm

BACKGROUND: The evaluation of amblyopia treatment efficacy is essential for amblyopia prevention, control, and rehabilitation. METHODS: To evaluate the amblyopia treatment efficacy more precisely and quantitatively, this study recorded four visual function examination results, i.e., visual acuity, binocular rivalry balance point, perceptual eye position, and stereopsis before and after amblyopia treatment. RESULTS: We found that all these four results had a significant difference between before and after treatment, and the relationship between visual acuity improvement and the difference of BRBP, PEP, and stereoacuity cannot show a fitting correlation regarding the widely used index of visual acuity as the standard of treatment efficacy. By using the Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method, a more comprehensive and quantitative index by coupling the selected four indexes with objective weights was obtained for further training efficacy representation, and the validation dataset also showed a good performance. CONCLUSIONS: This study proved that our proposed coupling method based on different visual function examination results via the CRITIC algorithm is a potential means to quantify the amblyopia treatment efficacy.