Blood flow velocity and thickness of the choroid in a patient with chorioretinopathy associated with ocular blunt trauma.

BACKGROUND: Choroidal circulation hemodynamics in eyes with ocular blunt trauma has not been quantitatively examined yet. We quantitatively examined changes in choroidal blood flow velocity and thickness at the lesion site using laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG) and enhanced depth imaging optical coherence tomography (EDI-OCT) in a patient with chorioretinopathy associated with ocular blunt trauma. CASE PRESENTATION: A 13-year-old boy developed a chorioretinal lesion with pigmentation extending from the optic disc to the superotemporal side in the right eye after ocular blunt trauma. The patient's best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was 0.2 in the right eye. Indocyanine green angiography showed hypofluorescence from the initial phase, with a decrease of mean blur rate (MBR) on LSFG color map, which corresponded to the chorioretinal lesion. The BCVA and foveal outer retinal morphologic abnormality spontaneously improved during follow-up. MBR and choroidal thickness increased by 23-31% and 13-17 µm at the lesion site and by 11-22% and 33-42 µm at the fovea, respectively, during the 6-month follow-up period after baseline measurements in the affected eye. In contrast, these parameters showed little or no changes at the normal retinal site in the affected eye and the fovea in the fellow eye. CONCLUSIONS: Current data revealed that both blood flow velocity and thickness in the choroid at the lesion site decreased in the acute stage and subsequently increased together with improvements in visual function and outer retinal morphology. These results suggest that LSFG and EDI-OCT may be useful indices that can noninvasively evaluate activity of choroidal involvement in ocular blunt trauma-associated chorioretinopathy.

Skin Cold Stimulation Can Modulate the Perceptual Rating of Musical Chords.

We studied the effect of cutaneous cold stimulus on the perceptual rating of musical chords. Despite the shown influence of music and tactile stimuli on human psychological evaluation, the effect of a cold stimulus on sound perception remains underexplored. We examined the effect of a cold stimulus on four psychological measures (frisson, arousal, pleasantness, and valence) as participants listened to two-note chords (consonance and dissonance). The cold-stimulus condition involved an experimenter touching the back of the participant's neck with a cooling device while listening to the sounds, while the control condition used a cooling device with the power off. For the frisson and arousal measures, the main effect of the stimulus condition was significant, showing that the cold stimulus increased the frisson and arousal measures. For the pleasantness and valence measures, there was a significant main effect of two-note chords, showing that a consonance was perceived as more pleasant than a dissonance; however, there was no significant main effect of stimulus condition, showing that the cold stimulus did not affect pleasantness and valence ratings. The results showed that a cold stimulus could bias frisson and arousal without affecting pleasantness and valence ratings when listening to musical sound.

Proximal Binaural Sound Can Induce Subjective Frisson.

Auditory frisson is the experience of feeling of cold or shivering related to sound in the absence of a physical cold stimulus. Multiple examples of frisson-inducing sounds have been reported, but the mechanism of auditory frisson remains elusive. Typical frisson-inducing sounds may contain a looming effect, in which a sound appears to approach the listener's peripersonal space. Previous studies on sound in peripersonal space have provided objective measurements of sound-inducing effects, but few have investigated the subjective experience of frisson-inducing sounds. Here we explored whether it is possible to produce subjective feelings of frisson by moving a noise sound (white noise, rolling beads noise, or frictional noise produced by rubbing a plastic bag) stimulus around a listener's head. Our results demonstrated that sound-induced frisson can be experienced stronger when auditory stimuli are rotated around the head (binaural moving sounds) than the one without the rotation (monaural static sounds), regardless of the source of the noise sound. Pearson's correlation analysis showed that several acoustic features of auditory stimuli, such as variance of interaural level difference (ILD), loudness, and sharpness, were correlated with the magnitude of subjective frisson. We had also observed that the subjective feelings of frisson by moving a musical sound had increased comparing with a static musical sound.