Fixing The Eyes With LASIK
If you are suffering from Myopia or Hyperopia and you don’t want to wear glasses, then maybe LASIK is for you. LASIK is an acronym for Laser-Assisted in Situ Keratomileusis. “In situ” is basically Latin for “in place” while Keratomileusis is a surgical procedure to improve the refractive state of the cornea. Before LASIK, Keratomileusis is done using a cryolathe where thin flaps of corneal tissue are frozen and the lathe shapes the eye lens in a similar manner as the lens of a pair of eye glasses are shaped.
In 1960, a microkeratome was developed by Dr. Jose Barraquer and replaced the cryolathe. The first Excimer Laser appeared in 1971 and was invented by Nikolai Basov of Moscow’s P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute. The Excimer laser became a very popular tool for delicate surgical procedures that require precision. Photorefractive keratectomy and Laser-Assisted Sub-Epithelial Keratectomy (LASEK) became possible but these procedures are painful and require longer recovery time. In 1990, Dr. Loannis Pallikaris and Dr. Lucio Buratto combined keratomileusis and photorefractive keratectomy as an attempt to develop an alternative to photorefractive keratectomy. This new procedure is now commonly known as LASIK. LASIK became very popular because less pain is involved and a far lesser time to recover after the procedure.
There are a few things to remember before a patient can undergo a LASIK surgery. Patients wearing soft contact lenses who wish to undergo LASIK surgery are advised to stop wearing the lenses 7 to 10 days prior to the procedure. Hard contact lenses require a longer time, which is usually 6 weeks. The surface of the patient’s cornea is examined first by a computer-controlled scanning device to map out the exact shape and detect irregularities. The data is then used by the surgeon to calculate where to operate and how much corneal tissue to remove. Antibiotics are prescribed to the patient beforehand and should be taken prior to the actual procedure to lessen the risk of infection.
The actual procedure starts with the patient receiving anesthetic eye drops and a mild sedative like Valium. The next step is to make a flap of corneal tissue using a femtosecond laser. The femtosecond laser creates tiny bubbles within the cornea and a hinge is left at one end of the flap. The flap is then folded back to reveal the Stroma. At this point, the excimer laser is used to make precise corrections on the Stroma. The corrections are only a few micrometers thick. During this step, the patient will only see a blur and mostly white light and can be disorienting. Excimer lasers today track the movement of the eye using a computer system that redirects the laser pulse to the area that needs to be corrected.
Wavefront-guided LASIK is an improvement to the LASIK procedure. The aim of using a wavefront sensor is to do a more optically perfect eye rather than a simple correction of focusing power to the cornea. Surgeons have claimed that more patients are satisfied using this technique because of a much lower incidence of visual artefacts caused by spherical aberration that traditional LASIK tend to induce.
Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Lasik
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