Certain retinal conditions are treated by direct drug injection into the vitreous humour; the subsequent delivery will be affected by vitreous motion driven by saccades of the eyeball. We model the saccades as small-amplitude sinusoidal oscillations, and the vitreous humour as a Newtonian fluid. Treating the vitreous chamber as a sphere, we obtain an oscillating flow plus a correction that includes a steady streaming flow on vertical planes, and we argue that both components have comparable importance for drug transport. In reality however, the vitreous chamber has an indentation due to the lens. Accounting for this leads to a perturbation in the flow field. The oscillatory component includes a vortex formed behind the lens every half period that migrates into the interior, and the steady streaming has two counter-rotating vortices.
Flow in the vitreous humour of the eye induced by saccadic eyeball motion
REPETTO, RODOLFO;STOCCHINO, ALESSANDRO
2009-01-01
Abstract
Certain retinal conditions are treated by direct drug injection into the vitreous humour; the subsequent delivery will be affected by vitreous motion driven by saccades of the eyeball. We model the saccades as small-amplitude sinusoidal oscillations, and the vitreous humour as a Newtonian fluid. Treating the vitreous chamber as a sphere, we obtain an oscillating flow plus a correction that includes a steady streaming flow on vertical planes, and we argue that both components have comparable importance for drug transport. In reality however, the vitreous chamber has an indentation due to the lens. Accounting for this leads to a perturbation in the flow field. The oscillatory component includes a vortex formed behind the lens every half period that migrates into the interior, and the steady streaming has two counter-rotating vortices.
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