Monday, September 28, 11:30am - 12:30pm (HH410)
Myopia is one of the most common ocular disorders impacting approximately 28% of the global population. One in ten Americans wear contact lenses to correct their myopia. It has been shown that, when placed on the eye, both the lens and the ocular surface deform. The goal of this project is to develop a mathematical model to predict the deformation of the ocular surface due to contact lens wear, where the shapes of both the eye and the lens are emergent properties of the model and are coupled via the suction pressure under the lens. We model the ocular surface as a strip of elastic tissue deformed by first only intraocular pressure (IOP), and then by both IOP and suction pressure from the contact lens. Given the in vivo shape of the eye that is pre-stressed by IOP, we first determine the stress-free ex vivo configuration via an iterative algorithm to predict the stress-free reference configuration for a desired stressed ocular shape. We then couple the ocular deformation model to a contact lens suction pressure model developed by Maki et al 2014 by iteratively solving the individual components of the coupled model. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the model and describe an instability in the suction pressure that we are struggling to resolve.