A Shell Model for Real-Time Simulation of Intra-ocular Implant Deployment

With 30 million interventions a year worldwide, cataract surgery is one of the most frequently performed procedures. Yet, no tool currently allows teaching all steps of the procedure without putting patients at risk. A particularly challenging stage of this surgery deals with the injection and deployment of the intra-ocular lens implant. In this paper we propose to rely on shell theory to accurately describe the complex deformations of the implant. Our approach extends the co-rotational method used in finite element analysis of in-plane deformations to incorporate a bending energy. This results in a relatively simple and computationally efficient approach which was applied to the simulation of the lens deployment. This simulation also accounts for the complex contacts that take place during the injection phase.