Topical review: Twenty‐five years of silicone hydrogel soft contact lenses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SIGNIFICANCE: The impact of silicone hydrogel (SiHy) contact lens materials on clinical contact lens practice and patient care over the past 25 years is reviewed, along with identifying areas for future innovation in material science and clinical practice to further improve outcomes for contact lens wearers.A quarter of a century since the launch of SiHy contact lens materials, with many current eye care professionals having never practiced without them as an option, this literature review reflects how this significant change in soft lens material technology has impacted routine clinical contact lens practice and patient care. SiHy lenses now account for approximately 75% of all new daily wear soft lenses fitted and they are available in a wide variety of modalities, replacement frequencies, and designs, including daily disposable, torics, and multifocals. From the physical properties of SiHy materials and their adoption to their use in helping meet patient needs, conclusions can be made where historical clinical issues have been solved, and where innovation in material science and evolution in clinical practice are still required to deliver the best outcome for contact lens wearers. SiHy materials have largely eliminated hypoxia as a complication seen in contact lens clinical practice, and when used for daily wear, in particular as daily disposable lenses, they provide an exceptional option for vision correction that is minimally invasive, comfortable, and effective. This review helps with the understanding of how the eye care profession has adopted the use of these lenses over the last 25 years, and questions what comes next for these widely used family of materials and the opportunities that exist for them to continue contributing to patient satisfaction and to growing the contact lens market.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".