Capstone Week 1

Week Overview

This week consisted mostly of setting up the team hours spreadsheet, setting up and logging into Jira and our blog, researching glaucoma and the Ahmed Valve, meeting with the client, and drafting our letter of intent. Below are some images from my research that I think can be applied to our project, as well as evidence of work done. 

Background Research

From “Rational Design of Microfluidic Glaucoma Stent” 

-Gives good visuals of design

-Gives good mathematical equations of trab. Meshwork resistance 

-Gives parameters used for calculations 

-Gives step-by-step procedure for stent design 

-a thicker outlet tube with internal resistance could be fabricated.

                                            From Flow resistance research:

From stent and valve research:

Ahmed Valve

-made of silicone or polypropylene

-The tube portion enters the front of the eye, or anterior chamber, while the rest of the implant sits on the surface of the eyeball underneath the conjunctiva and is covered by the eyelid. 

-The fluid that collects is then absorbed by the eye’s own veins and transported out of the eye cavity.

-The valve function of a glaucoma drainage device limits the flow of eye fluid in one direction, which puts a theoretical limit on how low the eye pressure can drop.

- Sometimes the tube shunt is not attached to a valve (e.g., the Baerveldt or Molteno shunts)

- In this case, some scarring has to take place initially before the tube opens, otherwise, the eye pressure will be too low.

- non-valved shunts sometimes work better for attaining lower eye pressure.

-can result in too low an eye pressure, or hypotony. Some patients with hypotony will have vision impairment.

Brightfocus.org Info: 

-Glaucoma surgeries are trabeculectomy or tube shunt surgeries (performed outside the eye) or istent, trabectome, cypass, and Xen sections (performed inside the eye) 

-They can either be internal or external 

From The SOLX® Gold Shunt Device for Glaucoma:

-Elemental gold has been shown to have good biocompatibility and to be inert as a foreign body in the intraocular tissues - “Besides being constructed of gold, the design includes several channels through its body besides those initially functioning that potentially can be successively opened after installation via a laser applied to windows in its anterior chamber component.” … “It seems highly likely that the posterior flow of aqueous will be constrained or blocked by fibrous encapsulation of the device's body in the suprachoroidal space.”

Team Contributions:

I also helped the team set up a shared folder in Google drive to help store our documents, and set up the hours spreadsheet.

Other things we did include creating questions for our client Dr. Rickard and meeting with him for one hour. And taking notes.