Intraocular pressure measurement method using acoustic signals

Abstract

Glaucoma can cause blindness, and one of the main causes has been found to be compression of the optic nerve by high intraocular pressure (IOP). In glaucoma, IOP is the most important biomarker for disease diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. Among methods designed to measure IOP, direct contact with the eyeball is the most commonly used method due to its high accuracy. However, this method requires the intervention of a medical staff, and has problems, such as infection, fear, and corneal damage, which occur when the patient's IOP is measured. Therefore, in this study, while overcoming these problems, we intend to present a new IOP measurement method that inherits the advantages of the existing method. The eyeball has a structure in which body fluid is contained in an outer shell of viscoelastic material, and the change in pressure applied to the outer skin according to the inflow of body fluid appears as IOP. When an acoustic signal is emitted to an eyeball with a different IOP, the wave propagation characteristics vary depending on the composition of the body fluid, and the IOP is estimated. It is expected that the patient can directly measure and manage IOP using the proposed method.