Wavefront laser eye surgery

Wavefront is a recent technology in laser eye treatment and can be used in conjunction with both Lasik (wavefront Lasik) and Lasek (wavefront Lasek). There are many advantages of Wavefront laser eye surgery and this is why it is considered the gold standard in laser eye surgery procedures. With standard Lasik and Lasek, the laser treats the surface of the eye (cornea) in a similar way to spectacles or contact lenses. This is considered a ‘one size fits all’ treatment as it does not allow for the unique imperfections on the surface of your eye. Glasses and contact lenses are a standard shape and they are calculated to best fit the ‘average person’. Wavefront laser eye surgery looks to address this problem.

 

Explaining Wavefront:

When you need glasses or contact lenses it is because the power of your cornea does not exactly focus the light entering your eye onto the retina. If you are longsighted your cornea is not powerful enough (too weak) to focus the light onto the retina. If you are short sighted your cornea is too powerful (too strong) to focus the light onto the retina. Glasses, contact lenses and standard laser eye surgery aim to re focus this light on to the retina and hence improve your vision. The only problem with this is that your cornea is not the exact same power right across its entire surface. Think of the cornea like the many ripples on a pond. From a distance it appears flat, but when you get up close there are lots of individual peaks and troughs. Glasses, contact lenses and standard laser eye surgery all take an average of these peaks and troughs and provide a standard one size fits all vision correction.

Wavefront technology however is different, as it takes many precise measurements right across the surface of your eye compared with only one point of your eye in standard laser eye surgery. The machine used to measure this is called the wavescan. Think of wavefront technology as accurately measuring all of the different peaks and troughs on your cornea and then producing an individual 3D digital map of the power right across the whole of your eye.  The wavescan does the same measurement for many different locations on your eye (e.g. 25 points – this varies depending on which wavescan machine is being used). All this information from the Wavefront scan (3D digital map) is then used when your eye is lasered, thus eliminating all these imperfections in the power of your eye, resulting in the best possible vision.

If 25 points are taken then you can say that the wavefront measurement is 25x more accurate and it can in some cases result in people getting even better vision than they ever had with spectacles or contact lenses.

If there is still anything you are uncertain of why not ask a question in our laser eye surgery forum.