Development and Validation of a Novel Device to Induce Localized Therapeutic Hypothermia.

Hypoxic conditions of the retinal tissue, if not treated with utmost promptness and accuracy, can result in significant vision loss and subsequent complications. Existing treatments for these conditions involve cooling the eye, but have low efficacy and variable duration; thus, this thesis proposes the development of a medical device capable of cooling the eye to induce mild therapeutic hypothermia up to the posterior retina. In addition to the design and assembly of the Eye Cooler Ring, a protocol and experimental setup were developed that enabled the collection of thermal data from fresh pigs’ eyes implanted with thermistors in order to validate the device. Before and after each experiment, MRI and CT images were collected to document the precise anatomy of the eyes and the position of the implanted thermistors. Simultaneously with the development of the experimental setup, a computational model was constructed to simulate the thermal development of the system; the purpose of this model is to be able to simulate the thermal trend recorded by the implanted thermistors so that the experimental load required to develop optimal cooling protocols and optimize the device design can be reduced in the future. The experimental results demonstrate that, in all recorded positions, the device can induce a thermal gradient sufficient to induce mild therapeutic hypothermia. The acquired images have sufficient resolution to distinguish all features of interest in the eye and thermistor positions. The computational model was able to approximatively represent the experimentally determined results.