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As time goes by, your body changes, and so do your eyes. The lens inside your eye helps you see things clearly by changing shape to focus on objects near and far. But as we age, the lens becomes stiff and loses its ability to adjust. This makes it harder to see up close, a condition called presbyopia. Scientists want to understand why this happens so they can find ways to help people see clearly as they get older. Since the lens is hidden inside the eye, we can’t easily watch how it works. That’s why researchers use computer models to study the lens and predict how it changes over time.

Why Is This Research Important?
Millions of people struggle with vision problems as they age, but scientists still don’t fully understand what causes them. Different researchers have used different models to study the eye, but their results don’t always match. This research builds more accurate computer models using real eye data to explore how different parts of the lens affect vision. It also compares different computer programs to see if they give the same results. By improving our understanding of the lens, we can help create better treatments for age-related vision problems, including new types of glasses, contact lenses, and even surgery.

What Did We Discover That’s New?
We learned that small changes in the eye can affect how well it focuses. The tiny fibers that pull on the lens play a bigger role than we thought. How stiff the lens is also changes how it works. These discoveries help us understand why vision gets worse with age and could lead to better treatments.

 

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Time never stops, and as it goes by, many things change—even your eyes. Inside your eyes, something incredible happens every day. The lens, cornea, and sclera are three important parts of the eye that help you see clearly. But as we grow older or with certain diseases, these parts begin to change and loose their function resulting in poor vision.

Why Is This Research Important?
Understanding the mechanical properties of the lens, cornea, and sclera is essential because they influence how the eye functions. With age, these structures can stiffen or lose flexibility, contributing to common issues like presbyopia (difficulty focusing up close). On the other hand, certain conditions such as high myopia or glaucoma are known to go along with mechanical changes in the sclera. By studying how these properties evolve over time, we can gain new insights into eye health and disease prevention.

What Did We Hope to Achieve?
My research is about understanding how material properties of the eye, like the lens, cornea, and sclera, change as we grow older. To do this, we’re using a special new method called optical coherence elastography, which lets us see how soft or stiff these parts are without hurting or touching the eye.
By learning more about these mechanical changes, we can figure out better ways to help people with common eye problems. If we understand how the lens stiffens as we age, we could find new ways to help elderly people maintain good vision at close distances. If we get to know how scleral stiffness changes in myopia or glaucoma, we could create more tailored treatments. This research could make eye care personalized, helping people of all ages keep their eyes healthy.

 

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Inside your eye, a perfect balance of pressure keeps everything running smoothly. But when that pressure climbs too high, it can harm the optic nerve and cause glaucoma—a silent thief of sight. Understanding how this pressure, called intraocular pressure (IOP), connects to eye movement, tissue properties, and vision clarity is key to protecting your eyesight and preventing vision loss. By detecting these changes early, we can take action before it’s too late.

Why Is This Research Important?
This research is crucial as it could lead to better, non-invasive glaucoma detection methods, while its unique multidisciplinary approach combines biomechanics (how the eye’s tissues move and respond to pressure) with optics (how pressure affects vision), aiming to recognize eye performance under different IOP’s, preserve vision quality, and enhance treatments for glaucoma and other eye conditions.

Wouldn’t it be great for eye surgeons to perform surgery more easily considering the characteristics of the eye?
The research highlights the importance of knowing how intraocular pressure (IOP), tissue stiffness (especially in the limbus), and the biomechanics of the eye affect vision and eye health. By considering these factors, surgeons could make more informed decisions during surgery, leading to better outcomes. This approach helps customize treatments, improve surgical procedures, and speed up recovery, leading to more precise and successful eye surgeries.

What Did We Discover That’s New?
It was discovered that the limbus plays a critical role in stabilizing optical performance. A moderate increase in limbus stiffness enhances stability, while excessive stiffness compromises adaptability. Additionally, lens displacement and IOP are strongly correlated, suggesting lens movement can serve as an IOP indicator.

 

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Imagine looking quickly from your phone to a clock on the wall. You probably don’t think much about it—but inside your eye, something fascinating is happening. After your eye stops moving, the lens (the clear part that helps you focus) doesn’t stop instantly. It wobbles for a brief moment. You can’t see or feel this wobble, but it’s real, and my research shows it could help doctors understand your eye health better.

Why Is This Research Important?
One of the biggest challenges in eye care is measuring the pressure inside your eye. This pressure is crucial because when it’s too high, it can lead to glaucoma, a disease that damages the optic nerve and can cause blindness. Current methods to measure IOP often involve uncomfortable procedures, like a puff of air to the eye or touching the eye with a special tool.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could check your eye pressure without touching your eye at all?
That’s where my research comes in. By studying how the lens wobbles after eye movements, we may be able to estimate eye pressure in a non-touch, painless way. This could make eye exams more comfortable and help detect glaucoma earlier, potentially saving millions of people from vision loss.

What Did We Discover That’s New?
We found that the way the lens wobbles depends on how much pressure is inside the eye. If the pressure is higher, the wobble changes. This means we might be able to measure that pressure by observing the wobble instead of using traditional methods. Now, more people might be willing to get their eyes checked regularly, leading to better prevention and early treatment of eye diseases.

 

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What are the factors that affect refractive errors?
Many people need glasses or contact lenses because of refractive errors. This is a pretty common issue in today’s society. It’s not uncommon to come across people with similar refractive errors, but are their experiences always the same? There are definitely differences caused by things like age, sex, ethnicity and other environmental factors.
What’s the main objective here?
This research looks at how these factors might affect different groups (same age, same ethnicity) and individuals. This is a great step forward in finding the best solutions for further eye modelling and personalised eyecare.
What have we achieved so far?
There are lots of different eye models in the scientific literature. We picked three of the most commonly used ones and compared them to find the best results in terms of general image quality. Next, we looked at different eye elements and mapped how different parts of the eye change refractive error.
What did we find out?
This is just the first step to better understanding refractive error progression and prediction. We found a new way to show how refractive error could differ with changes to the eye parameters. This could help ophthalmologists to take a much more personalised approach to treating refractive errors.

 

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Have you seen this scene where some adults put a book or phone away from their eye?
You won’t know the reason until you reach their age.
Then, you will notice you see near objects blurry and when you increase the distance of it to your eyes, you see better. That will be a sign that you need a reading glasses.
The reason is that our eyes have a mechanism called accommodation which controls the optical power of eyes, so we could see objects placed at different distances clearly. From the fifth decade of life, this mechanism gradually stops working and everyone becomes fully presbyopic by the age of 60.

Why is this research important?
Despite decades of investigation, the exact cause of this mechanism remains unknown.
Different theories for accommodation mechanism and presbyopia have been proposed, where some complete the previous ones and some reject the others.
Understanding this mechanism is the first step to improve the vision of elderly people.
What did we discover that’s new?
We proved one of the theories by our experiments, showing that although the continuous increase of stiffness of eye’s lens is the main reason for presbyopia, the rest of the mechanisms involved in accommodation, such as contraction/relaxation of the muscle involved in this action, remain active in elderly people. Besides, eye’s lens has lag (hysteresis) during that.
For example, when we asked elderly people to read a text for few minutes, we could detect small changes in their eye parameters afterwards using our optical devices.

 

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Imagine this: A doctor can create a 3D replica of your eye with just a click, then simulate surgery on that virtual eye before ever touching the real one. That’s what my PhD research aimed to achieve! I developed SyntEyes OBM, an advanced model that integrates both the optical and biomechanical properties of the eye to better understand their interactions and predict how the eye will respond to surgeries or treatments.
Why Is This Research Important?
Although the eye is one of the most important human senses and it is relatively easy to measure ocular properties, there are still surprisingly many aspects of the eye that remain unclear. Developing accurate eye models allows us to test various hypotheses and explore aspects of the eye that are difficult, or even impossible, to study through direct experimentation.
The primary goal of my research was to create an opto-biomechanical model of the human eye. This model can be used to simulate eye diseases, surgical procedures, and treatments, offering predictions that enhance our understanding of ocular function at an individual level. Ultimately, this work contributes to safer, more effective, and personalized eye care.

How Does It Benefit Society?
The SyntEyes OBM model benefits society by making eye surgeries more predictable, reducing uncertainty for patients, and allowing doctors to tailor procedures to individual needs. It enables personalized treatment plans, ensuring that therapies are customized based on each patient’s unique eye properties. Additionally, it accelerates research and innovation, providing a powerful tool for testing new treatments and surgical techniques, even when real-world data is scarce ultimately improving patient safety and surgical success rates.
What Did We Discover?
By taking into account individual variations in eye properties, SyntEyes OBM improves the accuracy of predicting surgical outcomes. This development paves the way for truly personalized eye care, ensuring that treatments are not only effective in general, but optimized for each patient’s unique eye.

 

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Myopia is a vision problem affecting millions of people worldwide. Myopia occurs when the eye grows too long, causing light to focus in front of the retina, resulting in blurry distance vision. Study show that factors like too much screen time and limited outdoor activities contribute to myopia in children. In our research, by studying how the eye grows and changes over time, we aim to uncover why some eyes develop myopia and how we can prevent or slow its progression. The graph in the right side shows changes in refractive power and spherical refractive error from birth to age 20 years. Myopic eyes show higher refractive error, unlike the reference condition where light focuses correctly on the retina.
What We Found and Why It Matters
Through our research, we developed a basic model explaining how different parts of the eye interact during growth, which affects whether someone becomes myopic or not. This model can predict normal eye growth and changes in growth based on scientific data. Our aim for future is focusing on how light, color, and other visual cues influence eye growth. The eye doesn’t just grow randomly-it adjusts based on the information from the retina; for instance, changes in light and focus influence its elongation or shortening, affecting myopia development. This understanding helps in managing and preventing myopia, especially in children.
How This Research Benefits Society?
Our research is important because it helps us understand myopia not just as a genetic issue, but also how lifestyle and environmental factors play a big role in its development. With the rise in myopia cases globally, especially in countries where children spend a lot of time indoors studying, it’s crucial to find ways to slow down or stop the progression of this condition. By improving our model of how eye grows and responds to different visual stimuli, we hope to contribute to better treatments and prevention strategies. This could finally help reduce the number of people who experience severe vision problems as they age and improve quality of life for those at risks of developing myopia.

 

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Isn’t it fascinating that your eyes don’t just focus on the center but take in the entire scene?
Understanding how the eye focuses light to create clear images, especially in the peripheral areas, has always been a challenge. When you look at something, your eyes don’t just focus on the center, you take in the whole scene, including the edges. The eye operates as a finely tuned optical system, using its biological structures to bend and focus light onto the retina at the back of the eye.
Have you ever wondered how these surfaces bend light so precisely to allow us to see clearly?
This study goes a step further by improving how we describe the eye’s optical surfaces, like the cornea and lens. These surfaces have different properties and understanding them more clearly helps us see how they work together. We also explore how light interacts with these surfaces and introduce new methods to map and study the retina, which is the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye.
Wouldn’t it be incredible if these findings led to better understanding and treatments for eye conditions that affect peripheral vision?
By focusing on how light interacts with the eye and improving the tools we use to study it, this research sheds new light on how the entire visual system works. We develop a new theory to explain how the human eye forms images in the outer edges of our vision, create a more detailed description of the optical surfaces involved, and design a novel method to characterize the retina. These discoveries could lead to better eye care, especially for conditions that affect peripheral vision, and pave the way for new technologies to help people see clearly across their whole field of vision.

 

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Corneal cross-linking is a surgical procedure designed to strengthen the cornea, the transparent outer layer of the eye. This treatment has the potential to change the cornea’s front curvature. In our study, we analyzed this effect experimentally and developed a model that can predict how a patient’s cornea will respond to the treatment. This model allows doctors to better plan surgeries, improving their success and patient outcomes.
Why is this research necessary?
According to the World Health Organization, 50% of the global population will be affected by refractive errors by 2050. In cases where refractive errors are asymmetric, glasses or contact lenses do not provide the specific correction required. Our society is in urgent need of refractive treatments that are tailored to each patient’s specific needs and deliver long-term results.
What has been discovered that wasn’t before?
We showed and, for the first time, quantified that by localizing the mechanical strengthening induced by cross-linking, we can achieve desired changes in corneal curvature. Inspired by these findings, we developed a model capable of predicting the effects of the procedure for individual patients. To demonstrate its reliability and clinical potential, we validated the model using clinical data from two different ophthalmic clinics.
How is this research beneficial to society?
Stiffening specific parts of the cornea could be a cost-effective way to treat asymmetric refractive errors. The model we created helps doctors plan the treatment and understand how it will change the shape of the cornea, leading to better patient outcomes.

 

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We focused our research on estimating the MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF THE HUMAN CORNEA, which is the most important refractive surface of the eye. Since these properties vary among individuals and change over time due to aging and diseases like keratoconus, accurately measuring them is essential for diagnosing and treating eye conditions.
Why is this research important?
Current methods for evaluating corneal mechanical properties rely on in-vitro tests that don’t fully capture real-life conditions. These tests can alter the tissue’s properties and fail to account for the natural shape and pressure inside the eye. A more accurate, non-invasive way to measure corneal mechanical properties was needed to improve diagnoses and treatments.
What has been developed that wasn’t before?
We developed a high-fidelity computer model to simulate how the cornea reacts to a puff of air during a clinical test called Non-Contact Tonometry (NCT). We defined a new way to estimate the intraocular pressure (IOP) that is more accurate than current methodologies. Additionally, we combined artificial intelligence with these simulations to create a fast, patient-specific method to estimate corneal mechanical properties in real time.
How is this research beneficial to society?
This research improves the accuracy of eye exams, leading to better detection and management of diseases like glaucoma and keratoconus. It also helps refine eye surgery techniques and optimize the design of medical implants for treating vision problems. In the future, these findings could lead to new diagnostic tools and personalized treatments, ultimately enhancing eye health worldwide.

 

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Eyes are the guide for the other senses. When refractive defects like myopia or astigmatism affect our vision, the outer world becomes blurred, not only physically but also mentally. For some of us, glasses become our best friends, we cannot live without them, we cannot even get up from bed to start our day. But, what happens when your best friend becomes your worst enemy? Glasses can cause a lot of discomfort, by causing headaches and tiredness. Thankfully, nowadays we have the possibility to choose if we want to wear them because, if we don’t, laser refractive surgery comes into help. This surgery can be performed to completely eliminate the present refractive defect and my research focused on investigating the impact of such treatment on the cornea.
Why Is This Research Important?
Imagine that you choose to undergo the surgery but you are not satisfied with the outcome or a post-surgical complication arises. Having a predictive model capable of obtaining the most reliable outcome, before performing the surgery onto the patient could be crucial in assisting surgeons in patient’s pre-surgical evaluation and improving patient’s satisfaction.
Which Benefits Can Be Obtained By Predicting The Surgery’s Outcome?
During my PhD journey, I focused on optimizing simulations of different laser refractive surgery procedures, that would allow the clinicians to perform a safer surgery and would help to prevent a post-surgical complication, that is the one of the worst enemies of our eyes, ectasia.
What Did We Discover?
When dealing with a system like the eye, it is fundamental to consider both the optical and the mechanical impact of refractive surgeries on the tissue. Depending on the selected treatment, the surgery can be more or less invasive from a mechanical point of view, thus considering patient’s specific tissue properties and geometrical characteristics is mandatory, to avoid any post-surgical complication.

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