At Eye Physicians of Austin, LASIK surgery gets a boost from wavefront technology

You would not wear "one size fits all" shoes. Your eyes deserve even better care.

An off-the-shelf lens for glasses or contacts can correct your vision fairly well, but many other people have the same prescription. Your unique eyes deserve individually customized correction. Thanks to precise, customized, "wavefront" eye mapping at Eye Physicians of Austin, LASIK surgery can help individuals achieve even better vision.

"The benefit of having wavefront-guided LASIK instead of conventional LASIK is that it reduces the possibility that you will have quality-of-vision complaints, such as poor night vision, difficulty driving at night, glare, halos and blurry images after surgery. Also, there are some optical aberrations that can distort your vision that cannot be corrected with glasses and contacts. They can only be measured with wavefront analysis," says the International Society for Refractive Surgery (a part of the American Academy of Ophthalmology).

At Eye Physicians of Austin, LASIK surgery is as individually customized as your fingerprint. That's because the computerized wavefront mapping guides the laser that the surgeon uses to correct your vision. This new level of measurement is 25 times more precise than standard methods for measuring glasses and contact lenses.

Before choosing to use wavefront at Eye Physicians of Austin, the laser eye surgeons considered how well it works. Here are the remarkable results the federal government considered when approving wavefront LASIK technology. At one year after the procedure:

• 100% of the clinical study participants could pass a driving test without glasses or contacts
• 98% of the clinical study participants could see 20/20 or better without glasses or contacts
• 70% of the clinical study participants could see 20/16 or better without glasses or contacts
• Four times as many clinical study participants were very satisfied with their night vision after the procedure, compared to their night vision before with glasses or contacts

Why Do Our Austin Laser Eye Surgeons Use Wavefront Mapping?

Any eye doctor in Austin can do an exam that produces a general description of your eye's focusing power (for example, nearsightedness, farsightedness or astigmatism).

But the eye often has small imperfections that cause some light to hit the retina (the back of the eye) in different places. These optical errors and aberrations cause blurry focusing. It takes wavefront mapping to record these subtle problems. In addition, precise measurements of the corneal shape itself can be done with a surface topography device, says the International Society For Refractive Surgery.

How Does Wavefront Work?

A wavefront scanner, called an aberrometer or analyzer, focuses a painless beam of light on the retina. A wave of light rays reflects back from the retina through the eye's lens, pupil and cornea. The scanner records the emerging wavefront pattern of light, including any irregularities the eye causes in the pattern. The wavefront computer then converts the information into a three-dimensional map of the light rays your eye's optical system produced.

At Eye Physicians of Austin, the ophthalmologist programs the LASIK laser with this wavefront data to help produce customized reshaping of your cornea.