Curriculum Vitae

Lea Hyvärinen's Curriculum Vitae with list of publications (PDF-file).
Lea Hyvärinen's Curriculum Vitae in Chinese (PDF-file).

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Short Curriculum Vitae

Lea Hyvärinen, MD, PhD, FAAP

Dr. Lea Hyvärinen is a Finnish ophthalmologist who, after her thesis on experimental fluorescein angiography in Finland, worked from1967 to 1969 as Dr. A. Edward Maumenee's Fellow at the Wilmer Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, USA, starting the first clinical fluorescein angiographic laboratory, which was an important area in diabetic retinopathy, retinitis pigmentosa and histoplasmosis at that time. At Wilmer Institute she became interested in vision rehabilitation and has worked in vision rehabilitation and development of assessment techniques since the 1970s when she was in charge of the first Vision Rehabilitation Centre in Helsinki, Finland. She has trained rehabilitation teams starting in 1984 in Madrid and has given courses in more than 30. Dr. Hyvärinen worked 7 years as the lecturer in ophthalmology at the Nordic Staff Training Centre for Deafblind Services and spent a sabbatical year in 1987 -88 at the Smith-Kettlewell Institute in San Francisco, CA, USA to study and to write a book on communication during assessment of deafblind patients. She worked 3 years at the Institute of Occupational Health and developed her LEA Numbers visual acuity test at full and low contrast levels for international collaborative studies.

Dr. Hyvärinen is best known of the LEA Vision Test System. She started the development of the tests for the then new vision rehabilitation centre in 1976. The LH-Symbols (now called LEA Symbols) tests for assessment of vision in children also became popular in vision screening. The LEA Test System now contains 40+ tests for numerous clinical test situations and vision screening and for the assessment of children and adults with different communication needs.

Dr. Hyvärinen works now as the Honorary Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Dortmund, Germany and as a Senior Lecturer in Developmental Neuropsychology, University of Helsinki, Finland. She lectures in many countries to help in development of transdisciplinary assessment for early intervention and education. In 2011 she and her co-author Namita Jacob published a summary of many of their lectures as a book “WHAT and HOW Does This Child See?” Her homepage www.lea-test.fi spreads information on vision on several languages.

The first tests were printed for our vision rehabilitation service as single copies in 1976 -1977 and for the health care centres in Finland by Instrumentarium in 1978. In the list of Dr. Hyvärinen’s publications is publication #55, Hyvärinen L. Uusi LH-näkötaulu neuvolaikäisille (1979) Lääkintäsähkö - Instrumentarium 4:14. (In English: New LH- visual acuity chart for preschool children) That time the test was meant for Finland and the Finnish health care centres and for referral services.

Figure 1. Children with very low visual acuity due to complete rod vision, rod monochromasy, were tested with regular near vision test (100% spacing), with more crowded near vision test, grating acuity test and recognition of small objects on different contrasting and less contrating surfaces. Behind the boy holding the grating acuity test is the small distance test for the 3 to 4 year old children. The tests were at that time, in 1983, called LH-tests.

The tests are visible in the book “WHAT and HOW does this child see” in the Chapter on Colour Vision in paragraph Achromatopsia (above). The chart is on the wall and the boys read the standard near test and the tightly crowded near test. The crowded test was the first test of its kind to improve diagnosis of reading difficulties before the child starts to read. The pictures are from a VHS film made in February 1983. The first grating tests are also visible in these pictures. After Instrumentarium, Artprint printed the tests and Oriola Company sold them to the Lighthouse in the US. Rather soon Lighthouse wanted to get the tests printed in the US by Precision Vision.

Dr. Hyvärinen has met Dr. Good in Dallas in early 1990s and discussed her tests with him but he was not interested. Ed Kopidlansky (who was working at Good-Lite) was present and talked Lighthouse to move the printing of the tests to the US. Later Lighthouse was not interested in the cognitive tests, which led to the direct agreement with Precision Vision (founded in 1991). The agreement with Precision Vision was signed on November 12th, 1993 and terminated on December 31st, 2003. During those ten years Dr. Hyvärinen designed a new test nearly every sixth month to cover the varying test situations in screening and assessment. During the years 1998 to 2003 Dr. Hyvärinen worked closely, nearly exclusively with Chris Greening who was the computer person at Presion Vision and created all nomograms and instructions with her.

The name VISTEST was problematic in the US because there was both Vistech and Visitest, so VISTEST remained for further development of the tests in Finland and Lea-Test was created for the international work. The Lea-Test is owned by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

In Dr. Hyvärinen’s name there is an "a with Umlaut". If it is difficult to print, use regular "a". Dr. Hyvärinen’s sign language name is signed as "good colour" ("good" = hyvä, colour=väri, thus "hyvä+väri" >> Hyvärinen).

Lea Hyvärinen, MD, PhD, FAAP

Apollonkatu 6 A 4, F-00100 Helsinki, Finland
e-mail: lea.hyvarinen (at) lea-test.fi