Diffractive Corneal Inlays: A New Concept for Correction of Presbyopia

A new class of corneal inlays for treatment of presbyopia is described, which uses diffraction as the working principle. The inlay consists of an opaque disk with a small central aperture surrounded by an array of micro-holes that are distributed following the order of a given Fresnel zone plate having N zones. In this way, the central hole of the disk produces an extension of the depth of focus of the eye for distance vision and contributes to the zero order of diffraction, and the light diffracted by the micro-holes in the periphery produces a real focus for near vision. In our general design, the number of zones and the diameter of the central hole are free parameters that can be used to design customized devices with different addition power and near-focus intensity. Two different designs are analyzed to show this property. In the analysis, we employed a ray tracing software to study the performance of the new inlays in the two different model eyes. The results are compared with those obtained with a model of the small-aperture inlay that is currently in the market. The different merit functions used in the comparison and the image simulations performed with the inlays in the model eyes show the excellent performance of our proposal.