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The Wavefront technology in LASIK eye surgery has been touted as the greatest advancement in LASIK eye surgery for the past year or two. But a new innovation has revolutionized the field of LASIK eye surgery which promises to be bigger and better than the Wavefront innovation. This is iris registration.

Before we go into the details of what iris registration is let us first understand how a LASIK surgery is performed.

It takes about five to ten minutes to complete the operation. First a mild anesthetic will be administered. Also eye drops are used to numb the eye and avoid pain during the operation. Though the operation is pain free there have been patients who have complained of discomfort. Once the eye is numb, a little device known as the microkeratome is attached to a suction ring placed on the eye. The microkeratome has a blade which cuts a thin flap on the surface of the cornea. The doctor will next fold back the flap and expose the stroma which is basically a layer of tissue. The stroma is searched for debris and is then dried. Now the surgeon will ask you to focus on a fixed spot while he, with the aid of laser mends the corneal tissue according to results of pre-operation examination. Once through, the flap is put back to position and an eye patch is provided to allow it to heal.

Today the microkeratome has been replaced by Intralase where instead of the metal blade cutting the flap, the job is performed by a computer guided laser.

So what is iris registration? Previously, lasers followed the patient’s eye moving up, down, left or right. Therefore as long as you move your eye left or right or up or down the laser beam can track the movement of the eye fine. However, there are other ways in which you can move your eye. For example, you can you’re your eye closer to the laser or away from it. Iris registration can track such movements and relay them to the laser so that the operation becomes more accurate. So is the case with you eye rotating. You can rotate you eye clockwise or anti-clockwise, which previous lasers wouldn’t have tracked. But Iris registration doesn’t fail here too. This is truly a remarkable progress in the field of LASIK eye surgery.

Nearsightedness

Nearsightedness occurs when the eye is too long and light rays focus in front of the retina, instead of focusing on the retina. Some of the symptoms of nearsightedness are blurred distant vision, eyestrain, and squinting, along with having a difficult time seeing at night.

Although nearsightedness can be easily fixed with glasses or contact lenses (when not too severe), many people don’t like to hassle with either one. With this new lasik procedure, folks will now be able to have pure vision.

Any surgery has its own sets of risks and complications. So it is advisable that before going into a surgery a patient should have a clear and complete knowledge of what the operation involves. It is generally the surgeon who explains beforehand what the patient might expect prior to and after the operation. Even the process of operation is at times explained, albeit in a lucid and easy to understand manner. It should be no else with this surgery also.Why would one go for LASIK surgery? Primarily because it is generally accepted these days that that surgery comes with the promise of improving one’s vision permanently so that the need for glasses or contact lenses is no longer there. So you are no longer dependent on them. In a way, you discover new liberty and freedom.So whom do you go to for a LASIK surgery? To the optometrist, of course. The first thing he will do is to conduct a number of tests on you to see if you are the right candidate for this surgery. Basically this eye surgery is used to cure three main types of eye conditions myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism. Myopia, also know as nearsightedness is the problem of not being able to see what is far away without glasses. Hyperopia, also known as farsightedness, is the other way round. Astigmatism is something different where the patient has irregularities in his cornea which as a result distorts the image formed on the retina of the eye.What will the optometrist be looking for? There are a few basic things that any optometrist will look for before a eye surgery. That would primarily include your eye health history. In case of a particular few diseases the chances of you undergoing a this surgery will significantly decrease. These would include glaucoma, herpes, eye injuries or thin corneas. Any of these conditions can disqualify you as a suitable candidate for eye surgery. Another important criterion is whether there has been an alteration in your eyewear prescription over the last year. Before this operation your eyes should be steady. If they are not then the optometrist might just postpone the surgery for a few months until he is satisfied that your eyes are ready to undergo that surgery.These are some of the basic things that you need to know as part of your pre-surgery preparation. Of course once you are considered suitable for the operation the doctor will brief you about the surgery itself and post operative care.

Opting for the right LASIK surgery to correct your vision today is not the same as it was a decade ago. This is comparatively a recent medical breakthrough. It was only in 1994 that the first eye surgery was performed. Back then surgeons didn’t have much option on how to go about the entire procedure. All they had was a microkeratome, a small mechanical blade which helped to create a flap on the cornea. Once the flap was created, conventional excimer laser was used for reshaping the tissue underneath. That would allow the cornea to focus light directly on the retina exactly as it happens in a normal eye. This is all the option that an optometrist had about a decade ago. Since the this surgery has gone through a sea change and amazing advancements have been made in the technology that is being used. Lasers have become much smoother and precise which has allowed patients to have better vision than they could have ever imagined before. One of the newest addition to this opertation technology is the machine called Intralase. This machine makes the metal blade redundant during a operation. Here flap creation is also done with the help of laser. So with the help of Intralase one can actually complete the entire surgery only using lasers. This makes the operation an all-laser surgery .The greatest USP of Intralase is that it significantly reduces the risks of flap complications. When one is using the microkeratome to create the flap on the cornea there are risks of complications. These would include a flap being cut too thin, that the flap can tear, or may be it will not cut completely. Once you start using Intralase, such possibilities are almost done away with. As the level of accuracy increases with the use of Intralase, the cases of re-operation also drop. That way it is a much safer option compared to microkeratome. But it must be understood that Intralase is not completely risk free. Flap related wrinkles and other similar problems are still a possibility eve with Intralase around. But it is also true that Intralase will bring down the actual cases of complications. There are detractors to Intralase whose man line of argument would be that it is too new a method to jump to conclusions and that there is no substantial evidence that prior risks are negated. Also Intralase increases the length of an operation thereby increasing the opportunity for other complications to be introduced.