US-12625391-B2 - Wavefront engineered lenses for correction of presbyopia and astigmatism and nanoparticle-doped liquid crystal structures for continuously tunable phase modulation and adaptive lens

Abstract

In some embodiments, wavefront engineered contact/scleral/intraocular lenses correct presbyopia and/or astigmatism. Some aspects relate to apparatuses including structures doped with certain nanoparticles to enhance alignment of liquid crystal materials. Some embodiments relate to tunable optical lenses for vision correction that have a structure with doped nanoparticles in the liquid crystal layer and alignment layer or only with blue phase liquid crystal layer without any alignment layer.

Inventors

• Guoqiang Li

Assignees

• Guoqiang Li

Dates

Publication Date

20260512

Application Date

20190201

Claims (6)

1. 1 . A liquid crystal adaptive lens, comprising: a liquid crystal layer, wherein the liquid crystal layer is doped with nanoparticles for enhancing alignment of nematic liquid crystal materials and the nanoparticles are comprised of polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS) or gold in a concentration of 0.5-5.0 wt %; a single alignment layer on top of a flat substrate, wherein the single alignment layer is a mixture of conventional alignment materials and the POSS or gold nanoparticles for enhancing alignment of the nematic liquid crystal materials in the liquid crystal layer, and the concentrations of the nanoparticles in the single alignment layer is 0.13-2.0 wt %; and a lens portion, formed with a continuous groove phase profile of a diffractive or Fresnel lens, which is made of glass or plastic, coupled to the liquid crystal layer and configured such that, when a voltage is applied across the liquid crystal layer, one or more optical properties of the liquid crystal adaptive lens are changed to provide correction of vision for a subject.
2. 2 . The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein there is no alignment layer on top of the surface of the lens portion.
3. 3 . The apparatus of claim 1 , further comprising conductive layers disposed on a top and bottom of the liquid crystal layer and configured to receive the voltage and apply the voltage across the liquid crystal layer.
4. 4 . The apparatus of any one of claim 1 , wherein one of the conductive layers is disposed on a top surface of the lens portion.
5. 5 . The apparatus of any one of claim 1 , further comprising a voltage source configured to provide the voltage across the liquid crystal layer.
6. 6 . The apparatus of any one of claim 1 , wherein the changes in the one or more optical properties when voltage is applied across the liquid crystal layer comprise changes in refractive index.

Description

STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH This invention was made partially with government support (liquid crystal devices part) under Grant no. R01 EY020641 awarded by the National Institutes of Health. The government has certain rights in the invention. CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS This application contains the intellectual properties described in provisional patent No. 62/624,962 and provisional patent #62624929, both submitted to USPTO on Feb. 1, 2018. BACKGROUND A natural phenomenon of the human eye as it ages is the loss of accommodation by the crystalline lens. At childhood, the accommodative ability of the eye can be well above 10 diopters (D), but this figure drops almost linearly to 1 D by the age of 50-60. Almost everyone starts to have difficulty in near-vision tasks at 40-45 years of age. This condition, termed presbyopia, is increasingly important in the US due to the lengthening of life expectancy. Right now about 123 million American adults are presbyopic, and 2 billion worldwide. The number of cases will keep increasing. To care for the vision of such a large population is of great value. Many techniques are used to correct presbyopia,1-6 including nonsurgical (spectacles and contact lenses) and surgical (conductive keratoplasty, excimer laser techniques, multifocal intraocular lens (IOL), and corneal inlays). For spectacle lenses, the solutions include bifocal, trifocal, and progressive addition lenses. They are all based on the area-division concept, i.e., each area of the spectacle lens has a different focusing power corresponding to near, intermediate, and distance vision. Consequently, the field of view and head and eye positions are limited for each vision task. An alternative method is monovision, where one eye is corrected for distance vision and the other eye is corrected for near vision. The disadvantages include the loss of stereopsis, the adaptation of the brain in information processing, and night driving. The electro-optic adaptive lens can overcome these shortcomings, and it is still an active research topic.7-26 According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75% of adults use some sort of vision correction, and about 11% of them wear contact lenses.27 Data suggests the majority of contact lens wearers prefer to stay in contacts once they become presbyopes; most contact lens wearers, 91% of the 35-55 year olds, would like to continue wearing their lenses when they become presbyopic28. Disposable lenses are a good choice for presbyopes who would like to occasionally wear contact lenses. Current contact lens options include29-34 (1) distance-vision contact lenses worn in combination with reading glasses; (2) monovision; (3) bifocal soft and rigid gas-permeable contact lenses; and (4) aspheric multifocal soft and rigid gas-permeable contact lenses. All of these solutions suffer from the same disadvantages listed above. Multifocal contact lenses also reduce contrast because the in-focus and out-of-focus images overlap with each other. The electro-optic adaptive lens, which changes power across the whole aperture, does not fit the contact lens format. There are no existing solutions for contact lenses that enable natural and binocular vision. This gap offers a great opportunity for making a very significant contribution to improve vision for millions of people. One approach to address these issues is to create an extended depth of field (EDoF) for the human eye with an optical aid. Depth of field (DoF) is the range in the object space within which an acceptable image can be obtained at the fovea. Theoretically, the DoF of a lens or an optical system is proportional to the square of the f/#, where f/#=f/D with f and D being the effective focal length and the effective aperture of the lens or of the system. The DoF can be extended by limiting the effective aperture of the eye and sacrificing the light and field of view. It would be optimal if the DoF could cover near, intermediate, and distant objects. Recently there have been reports on implantation of a small-aperture corneal inlay to treat presbyopia after laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) surgery.6 This procedure improves near vision with a minimal effect on distance vision and results in less dependence on reading glasses. However, due to the small aperture (e.g., the latest model ACI 7000PDT of the Kamra inlay has a 3.8-mm outer diameter and a 1.6-mm central aperture), the pupil is at least partially occluded across large areas of the field of view, including the central vision. This results in an interocular difference in retinal illumination.6 Other amplitude apodization methods35-36 have been proposed for EDoF, but amplitude modulation inherently reduces light throughput. Another approach that produces an EDoF is to induce spherical aberration of the eye or the eyewear. However the DoF can be improved by only a few percent by inducing spherical aberration.37 The imaging quality can be more d