Modeling a new dynamic approach to measure intraocular pressure with solitary waves

Abstract

Glaucoma is an age-related disease and the second cause of blindness in the world. The measurement of intraocular pressure (IOP) is the cornerstone of glaucoma treatment because elevated IOP is the only risk factor that can be modified. Clinical evidences proved that single measurements obtained during office visits are neither sufficient to capture the circadian rhythm of IOP nor valid to demonstrate the effect of medication or patients' compliance to a given therapy. As such, patients would benefit from a device that they can self-administer to gage the IOP multiple times a day. In this paper, we present a numerical study on a new approach to measure IOP noninvasively using engineering principles never explored in ophthalmology. The method relies on the dynamical interaction between the solitary waves propagating within a chain of particles and the eye to be evaluated that is in contact with the end of the chain. In the study presented in this paper, a numerical model of such interaction was implemented to demonstrate the sensitivity of the proposed approach to the variation of IOP. The findings show that some features of the waves are monotonically dependent on the IOP. These findings may pave the way to the development of a new kind of tonometer that will enable millions of glaucoma patients to perform routine self-measurements of the eye pressure without clinical visits.

Keywords: Finite element method; Highly nonlinear solitary waves; Intraocular pressure.