Validation of the Functional Vision Evaluation for Children (FVEC) battery

Abstract

We validated the recently developed functional vision evaluation for children (FVEC) battery, which quantitatively measures major eye and visual functions for rehabilitation. The protocol for this test comprises 12 items involving unique abilities of the functional vision evaluated for three subsequent periods. The validation procedure includes an analysis of the difficulty of the examiner’s performance, the reliability and symmetry evaluation of the battery items, and the prediction of the children in the low vision category on a 0 to 100 ranking scale of visual behaviors. Factor analysis evaluates the contribution of the items to functions of the ventral and dorsal visual streams. Consistency was similar between the three examiners and the reliability intra-subjects was also significantly high for examiner 1 (α = 0.86), examiner 2 (α = 0.85), and examiner 3 (α = 0.87). A factor analysis confirms that we arranged our data in two major factors expressing ventral and dorsal visual functions. The FVEC battery was validated showing high robustness, and internal consistency. The final scoring allows a qualitative and quantitative evaluation regarding the performances of the visual ventral and dorsal functions. Improvements in visual rehabilitation protocols based on FVEC battery are discussed.