ARTIFICIAL CORNEA

The cornea is the anterior transparent hole of the eye and its replace ment by a synthetic material proves indispensable in some kinds of cor neal blindness when penetrating keratoplasty is impossible. For a long time, the keratoprosthesis have been developped by different authors but results were always disappointing. Our personal works have been ce ntered on the utilization of an expanded fluorocarbon polymer as inter face between the optic of the keratoprosthesis and the cornea of the r ecipient. This material has given us a lot of satisfactions but our pr osthesis did not meet the criteria of a real artificial cornea because the rigid optic induced mechanical tolerance problems and did not all ow the measure of the intraocular pressure, We have developped a new m odel of artificial cornea with a soft optical zone with a diameter of 6 mm and an haptic made of expanded fluorocarbon polymer pretreated in order to induce a fast cellular ingrowth. We hope that this new optic al device could improve optical results and tolerance.