Seeing is believing?
New vision correction surgery is a step beyond LASIK
Still, every time he thought about having his vision corrected with traditional LASIK surgery, he backed out.
Until this summer. Livsey, 30, a third-year law student at the University of Utah, underwent the new customized form of LASIK surgery at the John A. Moran Eye Center. "Wavefront-guided" technology, approved this year by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, creates a three-dimensional map of the eye, which can be used to correct 64 "higher orders" of aberrations in the eye, going beyond what traditional LASIK surgery has been able to do.
Now his astigmatism is gone. And his vision is 20/20 in one eye and 20/15 in the other. Besides that, he figures he'll have paid for the surgery in a few years in what he's saving by not replacing glasses over and over.
It's technology that was designed for the Hubble telescope, now used to create the equivalent of a "fingerprint" of the eye, said Myrna Church, refractive coordinator at Moran. That map is put on a disk that the machine running the laser reads to deliver customized eye correction. Unlike standard LASIK, it looks at the whole eye and not just the surface. The result, she said, is "better vision."
Moran uses one of two machines, one by Alcon, the other by VISX (Bausch & Lomb also has an approved wavefront laser), both located in a room that's carefully controlled to keep out dust and lint, with set humidity and temperature. Technicians have to watch the weather closely, said Laurel Kay, manager of Moran's surgery center, and make adjustments to compensate for humidity or temperature change.
The customized surgery itself takes just a few minutes per eye.
First, the eye is put to sleep with drops, then an eyelid retractor is placed to keep the lids wide open. The most uncomfortable part of the procedure, Kay said, is placing a ring over the eye that "sucks up against it." Then a tiny instrument called a hansatome (they cost about $20,000 each) is used to cut a flap one-third the thickness of a human hair in the cornea.
The patient stares into a flashing red light, while an eye tracker keeps track of even minute eye movement to deliver precise treatment. Then the laser pulses, taking a little here and a little more there and a little over there.
With standard LASIK, a solid-beam laser hits it all at once. The customized wavefront procedure, on the other hand, taps here and there.
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