Success in the field

The accurate assessment of visual fields has been a stalwart of vision assessment for decades. Along with pupil function, it offers information about the health or otherwise of the visual pathway, allowing practitioners to be able to interpret any field loss that respects the vertical meridian in terms of where within the brain a lesion might be presenting.

More useful still in everyday practice, the health of the retina may be better understood, with the anatomical representation of retinal nerve fibres being reflected in visual field loss whenever damage occurs. Lesions causing retinal damage will show as loss of the ability to see stimuli in the opposite visual space and so be recordable as field loss.