Numerical study of customized artificial cornea shape by hydrogel biomaterials on imaging and wavefront aberration

Abstract

The blindness caused by cornea diseases has exacerbated many patients all over the world. The disadvantages of using donor corneas may cause challenges to recovering eye sight. Developing artificial corneas with biocompatibility may provide another option to recover blindness. The techniques of making individual artificial corneas that fit the biometric parameters for each person can be used to help these patients effectively. In this study, artificial corneas with different shapes (spherical, aspherical, and biconic shapes) are designed and they could be made by two different hydrogel polymers that form an interpenetrating polymer network for their excellent mechanical strength. Two designed cases for the artificial corneas are considered in the simulations: to optimize the artificial cornea for patients who still wear glasses and to assume that the patient does not wear glasses after transplanting with the optimized artificial cornea. The results show that the artificial corneas can efficiently decrease the imaging blur. Increasing asphericity of the current designed artificial corneas can be helpful for the imaging corrections. The differences in the optical performance of the optimized artificial corneas by using different materials are small. It is found that the optimized artificial cornea can reduce the high order aberrations for the second case. ? 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.