Geometric Model and Numerical Study of Aqueous Humor Hydrodynamics in the Human Eye

Abstract

The flow of aqueous humor (AH) in the human eye plays a key role in the process of transporting nutrients to the intraocular tissues and maintaining normal intraocular pressure. The pathogenesis of many ophthalmic diseases is also closely related to the flow of AH. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the mechanism of AH dynamics in the human eye. In this paper, we used image processing technology to denoise and segment the anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT) images and established a geometric model based on the human eye. At the same time, a model of AH dynamics in the human eye based on the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method was proposed. Then, we simulated the AH flow in the human eye with different morphological structures and different physical properties and analyzed the factors that affect the AH flow, including the shape of anterior chamber (AC), the crypts of iris, the indentation of cornea, the permeability of trabecular meshwork (TM), the secretion rate of AH, and the viscosity of AH. The results showed that the changes in eye tissue morphological structures and physical properties would affect the flow of AH. For example, the maximum velocity of AH flow decreases with the increases in cornea deformation. When the distance of cornea indentation changes from 0.3 mm to 0.5 mm, the maximum velocity of AH reduces by 17%. In the asymmetrical AC, the AH will form two different vortices. In the crypts of the iris, we found that the AH flow forms small vortices, a phenomenon that has not been reported in other papers. In addition, we found that the intraocular pressure (IOP) decreases with the increase of the TM permeability and increases with the increase of the AH secretion rate, and it is not sensitive to changes in the viscosity of AH.