QUANTIFYING THE ROLE OF KEY PARAMETERS IN PHOTORECEPTOR DEGENERATION

There are many causes of blindness but the ones without a cure are those involving retinal degeneration. While some of these may be hereditary, retina detachment is often caused by injury to the eye. Photoreceptor death is currently irreversible and thus pursuing treatments to prevent their death is crucial. In this work, we construct a mathematical model, using coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equation, of healthy photoreceptors and examine the effect that a detachment has on the parameters. By utilizing existing data in the literature, we first calibrate our model to match the data and then analyze the parameter changes that resulted in the photoreceptor degeneration. We then perform a global sensitivity analysis on the model output to determine which parameters are most influential on the results of the system.