Abstract
Worldwide many people suffer from blurry distance vision due to myopia, and it is expected that half of the world's population may suffer from this condition by 2050. While easily mitigated by wearing glasses, the condition is not harmless as it may restrict the patient's daily life or career choices. Moreover, more severe degrees of myopia often go accompanied with sight-threatening complications elsewhere in the eye. These implications led to a global research effort to understand the underlying origins and mechanisms that led to methods for prevention and treatment. But despite these successes many mysteries remain, thus preventing the improvement of these methods.
One of the limiting factors is that myopia involves nearly all aspects of vision, including optical, biomechanical, retinal and neural (OBRN) factors. To address this, we propose an interdisciplinary approach aiming to enhance the understanding of refractive development and the onset of myopia through mathematical eye modelling based on a recently published concept system. This proposed model will use concepts of optometry, physics, biomechanics, physiology and data science to develop comprehensive models of the various ocular elements, as well as how they behave and interact with each other during normal and pathological eye growth. This OBRN eye model will provide a dynamic simulation of refractive and myopic development by integrating the underlying optical and structural aspects with the lesser understood retinal and neural factors. By leveraging clinical data and advanced computational methods, this model will exceed the limitations of current models that often fail to capture the complex interplay of factors influencing refractive development. Instead, it will provide a framework to simulate eye growth and myopia progression under various preset conditions to gain insights into the factors that cause or reduce myopia progression. This approach enables virtual clinical trials to test hypotheses or the impact of therapies and interventions before real-world application. These simulations will therefore introduce an ethically viable and scientifically rigorous alternative to initial animal and clinical testing, allowing an optimisation of treatments virtually without the need for animal testing and minimising human clinical trials. This approach may revolutionize myopia management by providing tools to identify at-risk populations, develop tailored preventive measures, and optimize therapeutic interventions, including optical devices and pharmacological treatments.
The current SEP grant will help us lay the ground work for the OBRN model by expanding the existing concept system to include all the relevant biometric features of the eye. This model will have a modular architecture for future expansions, to be added once additional funding has been acquired.
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