Design of an alternative glaucoma drainage device using CFD tools

Glaucoma is an eye disorder in which the optic nerve is damaged over time due to a sustained elevation of the intraocular pressure. Being the second leading cause of blindness according to the reports of the World Health Organization, glaucoma is not only a serious ocular disease that threatens individuals, but a community health problem as well. The available contemporary approaches to the treatment of the disease are the medication, surgery and implants. In recent years, great improvement has been achieved in the technology of implants used in the treatment of the disease. Despite the great effort dedicated to the design and implementation of the Glaucoma drainage devices, the implants still have unsolved problems and weaknesses. The Venturi valve device designed by and named after Mateen Ahmed, is a commonly used device. This device has advantages such as compactness, durability, superior drainage mechanism over the others. However, it has a major disadvantage of undesirably coarse pressure control.At first, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of commercially available Ahmed Glaucoma Valve (AGV) is accomplished. In the light of the results, alternative micro-valves are examined and functionally the most appropriate one is integrated into the new designed device. Subsequently, CFD analysis of the new device and AGV are realized by stressing on the superiorities of the new design. Comparison of CFD analyses and experimentally obtained data existing in literature are made. Finally, improvements on the performance characteristics of the new design are discussed; conclusions are reached and suggestions for future work are presented.