Treatment Devices

Understand That LASIK is Two Step Process There are two important steps to the LASIK procedure. In Step one, your doctor creates a flap then folds it back exposing the middle layer of your cornea. In Step two an excimer laser is used to reshape your cornea, then the flap is put back into place.

STEP ONE – MAKING THE CORNEAL FLAP
The corneal flap can be created using a mechanical device called a microkeratome or can be created with a femtosecond laser called the Intralase®.

Microkeratome - Creating the Mechanical Flap
Conventional LASIK uses a mechanical device called a microkeratome to create the corneal flap. With this method, the doctor uses a hand-held microkeratome to cut across the cornea with an oscillating metal blade.

Achieving accurate depth, uniform flap thickness and centration on a curved cornea of varying dimension can be difficult with a microkeratome blade. The precision of this step is highly dependent upon the performance of a mechanical device, which may be unpredictable despite a high degree of surgical skill. If serious sight-threatening complications occur during this first step of LASIK eye surgery, they are often associated with the use of a microkeratome.

Intralase® - 100% Blade Free For A Safer, More Accurate Laser Experience
By replacing the microkeratome blade commonly used for corneal flap creation with a femtosecond laser, Intralase® has made LASIK eye surgery safer than ever before. The Intralase® femtosecond laser delivers micron-level accuracy - 100% greater accuracy than a microkeratome. This produces a more precise and consistent flap thickness which is critical for your doctor to perform step two successfully.

STEP TWO – RESHAPING YOUR CORNEA
Your cornea is reshaped using an excimer laser. At VisionMed, we use the Wavelight® Eye-Q. The Wavelight ® Eye-Q is one of the fastest and most advanced lasers in the world, using a 400Hz PerfectPulse™ frequency to enhance safety and increase accuracy.

There are three basic characteristics that an excimer laser system must have; these include a uniform beam profile that ensures a perfectly smooth corneal surface without grooves or ridges, a fast pulse frequency to minimize thermal cell damage, and an ablation pattern that prevents or reduces the induction of spherical abberrations that can cause night vision complications.

Aside from the ability to perform wavefront ablation patterns using the Wavefront Scan® treatment module, the Wavelight® Eye-Q features CustomScan®, the world’s first treatment module that allows for the treatment of corneal asphericity. The natural shape of the human cornea is aspheric. This means that all light rays meet in one sharp focus. Because conventional laser treatments do not take the natural aspheric shape of the cornea into consideration, the light rays become scattered causing problems in dim light or at night. The Wavelight® Eye-Q has the ability to perform a totally customized ablation pattern with the objective to maintain a natural post-operative shape and thus preserve the cornea’s asphericity.

Retrospective analysis comparing advanced excimer laser technology to older excimer laser technology demonstrated that the advanced Wavelight® excimer laser performed better in three areas important to laser surgery results and safety: corneal surface smoothness, thermal effect, induced aberrations. While older excimer technology is still safe, the degree of accuracy achieved with Wavelight® Eye-Q is unprecedented in excimer laser technology.

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