Damien Gatinel

About Damien Gatinel

“Over the past 12-18 months, my work has been guided by a very practical clinical question – Why can't we predict, patient by patient, what the combined ‘cornea + implant’ optical system will actually deliver on the retina? We have extraordinary lens designs, yet preoperative choices still often rely on average‑eye assumptions, simplified labels, or personal experience that is difficult to translate to eyes with atypical corneas.

“A major strand of my recent work has been to make preoperative simulation of optical quality genuinely accessible to ophthalmologists, particularly for post‑refractive and otherwise irregular corneas-eyes. This requires two ingredients that are rarely brought together. The first is high‑precision bench characterization of IOL optics: not just nominal add powers, but the true optical behaviour of the implant. The second is a digital pipeline that can couple those measured IOL optics with patient‑specific corneal models derived from 3D corneal data. That coupling is computationally demanding when you combine complex IOL optics with detailed corneal reconstructions; our focus has been to develop practical numerical strategies that keep simulation fast without sacrificing what matters clinically.

With my colleague Benjamin Stern, we wanted to put something useful in surgeons' hands right away, so we made the AIOLsci web platform available to clinicians. It allows ophthalmologists to use a simplified aspheric cornea model and compare through‑focus retinal contrast curves for the majority of monofocal, EDOF and multifocal IOLs currently on the market. Until now, this kind of side‑by‑side optical comparison simply did not exist in a form clinicians could use at the point of care.

A second strand of recent work has been to make optical quality more intelligible for clinicians. I previously proposed an alternative basis (the Gatinel-Malet polynomials), but expressing optical properties in microns does not speak the clinician's everyday language. More recently, we developed a new descriptive function basis expressed directly in diopters. Translating wavefront data from microns into diopters may sound like a simple change of units, but it is in fact a natural and long‑overdue step that should make aberration data far more readable at the slit lamp and in the consulting room.