Dr Elena Redaelli finished her PhD

 

Date of the defence: 23rd September 2024

Title of the thesis: Characterizing patient-specific corneal biomechanics: high fidelity modeling and AI techniques.

Brief summary: Estimating the biomechanical properties of ocular tissues is crucial for understanding, diagnosing, and treating certain ocular pathologies, such as corneal ectasias, but also for planning refractive surgeries, implanting intrastromal segments and corneal crosslinking treatments among others. Non Contact Tonometry (NCT) is a non invasive diagnostic test in which the cornea is deformed by an air jet and the deformation is recorded through a high-speed camera. However, the deformation of the cornea during the air-puff results from the combination of four factors: the pressure of the air-jet, the mechanical properties of the corneal tissue, the corneal thickness and the intraocular pressure (IOP). Currently, the estimation of the IOP in-vivo depends on these corneal structural factors. Moreover, a methodology to estimate the mechanical properties of the corneal tissue in-vivo is still missing.This doctoral thesis aims to estimate independently the IOP and the mechanical properties of human corneal tissue in vivo and in real-time through a combination of high-fidelity numerical models and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The first detailed Fluid Structure Interaction simulation of the NCT is presented and used to formulate a new methodology to estimate the IOP independently on the mechanical properties of the corneal tissue and on the corneal thickness. Then, a methodology based on AI to estimate in real time the patient specific mechanical properties of the corneal tissue in vivo is proposed. The combination of high fidelity modelling with AI allows for the first time a real time assessment of patient specific mechanical properties of the corneal tissue in vivo.