A stiffness sensor to help in the diagnosis and the surgery of orbital pathologies

Proptosis is characterized by a protrusion of the eyeball due to an increase of the orbital tissue volume. To recover a normal eyeball positioning, the most frequent surgical technique (BROD technique) consists in the osteotomy of orbital walls combined with a loading on the eyeball to initiate tissue decompression. In this paper, a stiffness sensor device is proposed to (1) provide to the surgeon pre, intra and post-operative data concerning the stiffness of the intra-orbital soft tissues, and (2) provide constitutive parameters to the Finite Element model of the intra-orbital tissues already developed by the authors and used to predict consequences orbital surgery.