Ignacio Jiménez-Alfaro, Marcos Rubio, Eduardo Lage, María Abellanas-Lodares, Ángeles Román-Daza, Carlos S. Hernández, Pablo Pérez-Merino, Andrea Gil, Shivang R. Dave, Nicolas Alejandre, Daryl Lim, Gonzalo Velarde, Ignacio Casares, UAM. Departamento de Cirugía, UAM. Departamento de Tecnología Electrónica y de las Comunicaciones, Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Fundación Jiménez Díaz (IIS-FJD), and Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Fundación Jiménez Díaz (ISS-FJD)
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited, Purpose To assess the performance of an open-view binocular handheld aberrometer (QuickSee) for diagnosing refractive errors in children. Methods 123 school-age children (9.9 ± 3.3 years) with moderate refractive error underwent autorefraction (AR) with a standard desktop device and subjective refraction (SR), with or without cycloplegia to determine their eyeglass prescription. Measurements with QuickSee (QS) were taken in 62 of these patients without cycloplegia (NC), and in 61 under cycloplegia (C). Differences in refraction values (AR vs SR vs QS) as well as the visual acuity (VA) achieved by the patients with each method (QS vs SR) were used to evaluate the performance of the device in measuring refractive error. Results The spherical equivalent refraction obtained by QS agreed within 0.5 D of the SR in 71% (NC) and 70% (C) of the cases. Agreement between the desktop autorefractor and SR for the same threshold was of 61% (NC) and 77% (C). VA resulting from QS refractions was equal to or better than that achieved by SR procedure in 77% (NC) and 74% (C) of the patients. Average improvement in VA with the QS refractions was of 8.6 and 13.4 optotypes for the NC and C groups respectively, while the SR procedure provided average improvements of 8.9 (NC) and 14.8 (C) optotypes. Conclusions The high level of agreement between QuickSee and subjective refraction together with the VA improvement achieved in both study groups using QuickSee refractions suggest that the device is a useful autorefraction tool for school-age children, Eduardo Lage is funded by the Ramon y Cajal program from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitivity (RYC-2016-21125). Pablo Perez-Merino was funded by the Juan de la Cierva program from the same Ministry (FJCI-2015-27101). Carlos S. Hernandez and Andrea Gil are funded by the Madrid Regional Government through IND2019/TIC-17116 grant