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We introduce an innovative model of the human corneal stroma, regarded as a fluid-saturated continuum, with to objective to describe important swelling and thinning phenomena observed in pathological conditions. In contrast with well-settled approaches that model the stroma as a quasi-incompressible hyperelastic medium, possibly including anisotropy and heterogeneity, here we focus on the actual nature of the tissue, where the content of water reaches about 78% in weight. Although purely mechanics models have been shown to be very good at predicting physiological behaviors, they have not been able to reproduce the evolution of pathologies related to the imbalance of water content in the stroma. We regard the tissue as a fully saturated mixture of a solid phase and a fluid phase, preserving the possibility to characterize both phases in terms of multiple components. This study represents a first step towards the development of a multiphysics model capable of explaining corneal swelling and ectasia.
The work is done in collaboration with Alessandro Giammarini (Polimi).
