Custom speckle interferometer for the study of eye diseases

Mechanical stress and strain are thought to be significant risk factors for many ocular diseases. Indeed, significant correlations between the mechanical load imposed by intraocular pressure (IOP) and the etiology of ocular pathologies—such as glaucoma, myopia, and keratoconus—have been found in many studies. Furthermore, IOP is thought to be the most relevant risk factor for the onset and development of permanent visual damage caused by glaucoma (a worldwide ocular pathology and a leading cause of permanent visual loss). The results of several numerical studies have been used to explain the relationship between ocular tissue biomechanics and the development of ocular diseases.4–8 However, the significance and reliability of these numerically based studies (based mainly around finite element methods) are strongly dependent on the underlying assumptions needed to build the numerical models and simulations. For instance, assumptions on the boundary conditions and material constitutive equations can severely affect the outcome of the numerical simulations, and in many cases the validity of the assumptions is hard to confirm experimentally.