A review of patient-reported outcome measures used in uveitis.

We review patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) used to evaluate the quality of life (QoL) in uveitis and provide a quality assessment of the psychometric properties of the PROMs, making it easier to choose the best questionnaire for uveitis. Our review included 158 articles. A total of 98 PROMs were used to measure QoL in uveitis and the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire 25 (NEI VFQ -25) was the most frequently used PROM in these studies. There were 5 uveitis-specific PROMs, but they were meant for either birdshot choroidopathy or cytomegalovirus retinitis or paediatric uveitis. There are no PROMs developed explicitly for the more common, anterior uveitis, intermediate uveitis, panuveitis, and chronic uveitis. The uveitis-specific PROMs performed better in our quality assessment criteria compared to other PROMs. However, these PROMs were constructed using traditional classical test theory and have not been assessed using the modern family of psychometric assessment methods such as Rasch analysis. As new therapeutic modalities for uveitis such as the new biological agents and steroid implants, continue to evolve, a comprehensive PROM will be increasingly valued in clinical trial settings to compare the effects of treatments from the patient's perspective.

Assessment of patient-reported outcome measures used in corneal transplantation: a systematic review.

The aim of this study was to review all the articles that have implemented patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) to evaluate the quality of life (QoL) in corneal transplantation and discuss quality assessments of the PROMs. An extensive literature review was undertaken to identify all the studies that used PROMs to assess the QoL in corneal transplantation. Non-original or review articles, articles on other subject area and articles on cost-effectiveness/utility without PROM data/results were excluded. Each PROM was assessed against the following criteria: content development (item identification and item selection), psychometric properties, validity, reliability, and responsiveness. 425 articles were identified of which 35 articles were included in the final review. PROMs in corneal transplantation were used to (a) evaluate the QoL after surgery, (b) compare the QoL scores between different surgical techniques and (c) determine the relationship between QoL and objective measures such as visual acuity, visual field and stereoacuity. A total of 17 PROMs were used to assess QoL in corneal transplantation. Whilst this search did not produce any PROMs that were specifically designed to assess corneal transplantation, most studies were found to have employed the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire 25 (NEI VFQ 25). The Visual Function Index 14 (VF 14) performed better in the present quality assessment criteria compared to other PROMs, however, the NEI VFQ 25 and the VF 14 PROMs were not specifically developed for corneal transplantation and therefore the QoL assessment made using these PROMs may be incomplete. As improvements in various forms of lamellar transplantation surgery techniques such as UT-DSAEK and FT-DSAEK have resulted in better visual outcomes, improved graft survival and reduced complications, a corneal transplantation specific PROM will be useful in clinical settings to compare the outcomes of different surgical techniques from the patient perspective.

Computerized summary scoring: crowdsourcing-based latent semantic analysis.

In this study we developed and evaluated a crowdsourcing-based latent semantic analysis (LSA) approach to computerized summary scoring (CSS). LSA is a frequently used mathematical component in CSS, where LSA similarity represents the extent to which the to-be-graded target summary is similar to a model summary or a set of exemplar summaries. Researchers have proposed different formulations of the model summary in previous studies, such as pregraded summaries, expert-generated summaries, or source texts. The former two methods, however, require substantial human time, effort, and costs in order to either grade or generate summaries. Using source texts does not require human effort, but it also does not predict human summary scores well. With human summary scores as the gold standard, in this study we evaluated the crowdsourcing LSA method by comparing it with seven other LSA methods that used sets of summaries from different sources (either experts or crowdsourced) of differing quality, along with source texts. Results showed that crowdsourcing LSA predicted human summary scores as well as expert-good and crowdsourcing-good summaries, and better than the other methods. A series of analyses with different numbers of crowdsourcing summaries demonstrated that the number (from 10 to 100) did not significantly affect performance. These findings imply that crowdsourcing LSA is a promising approach to CSS, because it saves human effort in generating the model summary while still yielding comparable performance. This approach to small-scale CSS provides a practical solution for instructors in courses, and also advances research on automated assessments in which student responses are expected to semantically converge on subject matter content.