Contact Probe Based Stiffness Sensing of Human Eye by Considering Contact Area

The contact tonometer is commonly used for measuring the internal eye pressure to diagnose glaucoma. However, the conventional eye pressure measurement is valid only under the assumption that all subjects have the same structural eye stiffness. This paper challenges to measure the contact area between the probe and the cornea in addition to the corneal deformation for considering the individual differences in the structural eye stiffness. Prior to the experiment, a spherical model of an eye is developed and the analytical eye stiffness is introduced. The experiment is conducted based on the contact method where a contact probe is pressed on an anesthetized cornea. The deformation of the cornea and the contact area are captured by cameras during the experiment. The experimental results show that the measured stiffness nicely matches the analytical solution based on the constructed model. However, some subjects have different relationships between the displacement and the contact area even with similar estimated eye pressures. This suggests that the structural eye stiffness should be considered for more precise diagnoses of glaucoma.