Characterisation of the porcine eyeball as an in-vitro model for dry eye

Francesco Menduni, Leon N Davies, David Madrid-Costa, Antonio Fratini, James S. Wolffsohn

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Purpose:
To characterise the anatomical parameters of the porcine eye for potentially using it as a laboratory model of dry eye.
Methods:
Anterior chamber depth and angle, corneal curvature, shortest and longest diameter, endothelial cell density, and pachymetry were measured in sixty freshly enucleated porcine eyeballs.
Results:
Corneal steepest meridian was 7.85 ± 0.32 mm, corneal flattest meridian was 8.28 ± 0.32 mm, shortest corneal diameter was 12.69 ± 0.58 mm, longest corneal diameter was 14.88 ± 0.66 mm and central corneal ultrasonic pachymetry was 1009 ± 1μm. Anterior chamber angle was 28.83 ± 4.16°, anterior chamber depth was 1.77 ± 0.27 mm, and central corneal thickness measured using OCT was 1248 ± 144μm. Corneal endothelial cell density was 3250 ± 172 cells/mm2.
Conclusions:
Combining different clinical techniques produced a pool of reproducible data on the porcine eye anatomy, which can be used by researchers to assess the viability of using the porcine eye as an in-vitro/ex-vivo model for dry eye. Due to the similar morphology with the human eye, porcine eyeballs may represent a useful and cost effective model to individually study important key factors in the development of dry eye, such as environmental and mechanical stresses.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)13-17
JournalContact Lens and Anterior Eye
Volume41
Issue number1
Early online date3 Oct 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2018

Bibliographical note

© 2017 British Contact Lens Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Funding: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 642760.

Keywords

  • Porcine eye
  • Dry eye
  • Confocal microscopy
  • Optical coherence tomography

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