Estimating the true distribution of visual field progression rates in glaucoma

Abstract

PURPOSE. Bayesian methods allow the distribution of glaucomatous visual field progression rates in the population to constrain individual progression rate estimates. As the true population distribution is never known, it must itself be estimated from a finite number of noisy individual estimates of rate. We used simulations to investigate the relationship between the true distribution of progression rates and that estimated from noisy empirical data.METHODS. We generated series of visual fields (3-10 per patient) using different variabilities (SD of 0.5-2.0 dB) for the summary index mean deviation (MD) to determine the relationship between the distribution of empirical estimates of progressi..