Contact glass tonometer

BACKGROUND: This paper presents a tonometer built into a contactlens, which allows to measure the eye-pressure and to perform ophthalmoscopy at the same time. Artificially induced changes of the eye-pressure and their influence on the visible fundus can now be checked simultaneously. The contactlens-tonometer (CGT) also is able to record continuously the pulse-curve, which can indicate any circulatory problem. So, the device is expected to give us additional diagnostic criteria of early glaucoma. Each ophthalmologyst in the field will be able to perform with this device a oculodynamometry in an easy way. By this it is possible to estimate the pressure-tolerance of the optic disk from glaucoma-patients. MEASUREMENTS: There have been taken some measurements on enucleated human eyes, comparing our device with a Statham-transducer in the vitreous. We found a good correlation. In a second step, we made measurements (65) on healthy volunteers, comparing the device with Perkins-Tonometry. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We found a correlation (R = 0.58). The error of the measurements was about +/- 3 mm Hg. Considering both, the deviation of the Perkins-Tonometer with which our results were compared, and the fact of a good correlation (R = 0.999) in the study with the enucleated human eyes, we found that the contact-lens-tonometer measures the intraocular pressure exactly. In future studies, we want to analyze the dynamic component of the measurements.