Wavefront LASIK Offers Improved Corrective Surgery

Laser-assisted refractive surgery is great for improving how much you can see, but until recently it hasn’t always been so great at improving how well you can see. This means that while procedures such as LASIK can improve your vision, sometimes they don’t improve your night vision or how well you can make out fine detail. In fact, sometimes these procedures can actually have a negative impact on how well you see, causing halos and glares in your vision, especially when you’re dealing with bright lights or low light.

Wavefront LASIK, a relatively new innovation in the field of laser-assisted refractive surgery, is improving things, allowing more accuracy in procedures and better results. The Wavefront procedure allows doctors to perform a customized surgery better-tailored to your specific vision needs.

Wavefront technology, or aberrometry, tests for higher and lower order aberrations in your vision by measuring how a wavefront of light passes through the eye. The test is done with an aberrometer. This device is basically a set of lenses attached to a chin strap apparatus. The patient puts his or her head in the chin strap, looks into the lenses, a ray of light is flashed into the patient’s eyes and the aberrometer records it. A 3-D map of the eye is then made, which helps to better guide the excimer laser used to sculpt your cornea into the right shape.

Lower order aberrations account for more than 80 percent of all vision problems and include conditions such as hyperopia, myopia and astigmatism. Higher order aberrations are more complex vision problems such as coma, trefoil and spherical aberration. Eye doctors used to largely ignore higher order aberrations because it was believed that they had little impact on vision. Now with the advent of laser-assisted refractive surgery, it’s been found that higher-order aberrations are the cause of many of the undesired aftereffects of some LASIK surgeries, such as seeing halos or problems with night vision.

Wavefront LASIK helps fix higher order aberrations because it offers a much more detailed picture of the eye and where it needs to be fixed. Because of this better information, the computer guiding the excimer laser in the LASIK procedure can better improve the eye.

Wavefront LASIK has a lot of potential benefits to offer patients. For starters, Wavefront LASIK patients enjoy a better chance of getting 20/20 or better vision following the procedure, have a reduced chance of “backsliding” or eventually losing the gains realized through the procedure and also have a much smaller chance of developing problems with their night vision after the surgery. The procedure also gives “backsliders” a chance to regain their best-corrected vision they had achieved after their first laser-assisted refractive surgery.

One key area where Wavefront LASIK can really help is in contrast detail. Contrast detail is basically the ability to see in low light or how well you can distinguish objects in a similiarly colored or shaded background. Even folks with 20/20 vision can have trouble with contrast sensitivity, causing things to fade into the background at times. This is a particularly dangerous condition for night drivers, so in terms of public safety, wavefront LASIK is an excellent development.

The guidelines for whether a patient is a good candidate for Wavefront LASIK are the same as those for regular LASIK patients. The candidate should be above 21 years of age, should have had a stable eyeglasses or contact prescription for a year, and should have a mild to moderate problem with myopia, hyperopia or astigmatism. The success of the operation can depend on the age of the patient, and how serious his or her vision problems are.

In the past, Wavefrong LASIK cost hundreds of dollars more than standard LASIK, but as the technology has become more common, and in the midst of the current recession, many doctors are charging the same price for Wavefront LASIK as regular LASIK, about $1,500 per eye. Considering what you’ll spend over a lifetime on glasses, contacts and eye exams, this is a steal.

Like any laser-assisted refractive surgery, there is a risk of complication in Wavefront LASIK. The most common complaint in LASIK patients is dry eye, an unpleasant feeling that occurs when matter from the surgery is trapped under the corneal flap made in the surgery, making the patient feel as if he or she has a piece of sand in his or her eye. This happens to very few patients, however.

Tagged aberrometry, Astigmatism, Contrast detail, Corrective Surgery, excimer laser, hyperopia, myopia, Wavefront LASIK