Pandolfi Anna, Boschetti Federica
a Laboratory of Biological Structure Mechanics , Politecnico di Milano , Milano , Italy.
Comput Methods Biomech Biomed Engin. 2015;18(1):64-77. doi: 10.1080/10255842.2013.778983. Epub 2013 Mar 22.
To withstand the high probability of success, the growing diffusion of laser surgery for the correction of visual defects, corneal surgeons are regarding with interest numerical tools able to provide reliable predictions of the intervention outcomes. The main obstacle to the definition of a predictive numerical instrument is the objective difficulty in evaluating the in vivo mechanical properties of the human cornea. In this study, we assess the ability of a parametrised numerical model of the cornea (Pandolfi and Manganiello 2006) to describe individual pressurisation tests on whole porcine corneas once the mechanical parameters of the model have been calibrated over average data. We also aim at estimating the sensitivity of the mechanical response with the variation of basic geometrical parameters, such as the central corneal thickness, the curvature and the in-plane diameter. We conclude that the actual geometry of a cornea has a minor role in the overall mechanical response, and therefore the material properties must be considered carefully and individually in any numerical application. This study makes use of the data obtained from a wide experimental program, where a set of 21 porcine corneas has been fully characterised in terms of mechanical and geometrical properties (Boschetti et al. 2012).
为了应对激光手术矫正视力缺陷取得高成功率的情况，角膜外科医生对能够提供可靠干预结果预测的数值工具颇感兴趣。定义一种预测性数值工具的主要障碍在于客观上难以评估人眼角膜的体内力学特性。在本研究中，我们评估了角膜参数化数值模型（潘多尔菲和曼加涅洛，2006年）在基于平均数据校准模型力学参数后，描述对整个猪角膜进行的个体加压测试的能力。我们还旨在估计力学响应随基本几何参数（如中央角膜厚度、曲率和平面内直径）变化的敏感性。我们得出结论，角膜的实际几何形状在整体力学响应中作用较小，因此在任何数值应用中都必须仔细且单独地考虑材料特性。本研究利用了从一个广泛的实验项目中获得的数据，其中一组21个猪角膜已在力学和几何特性方面得到全面表征（博谢蒂等人，2012年）。
