Lasik Eye Surgery

What Is Custom Lasik Surgery?

There are situations where a person contemplating getting LASIK surgery needs a highly-customized diagnosis and measurement to map the work the laser will do in reshaping the cornea and correcting refractive errors causing poor vision in the eye. Thus, the name given to this is Custom LASIK surgery or also known as Wavefront LASIK. With Custom LASIK surgery, the measurements on the eye are three-dimensional and take into account how your eye processes images in terms of not just sight but quality of site. Custom LASIK surgery can produce much better outcomes than traditional LASIK and in some cases is used to correct LASIK surgeries that had poor outcomes.

Persons with myopia, hyperopia, or astigmatism that is classified as light to medium make the best candidates for custom LASIK surgery. This makes sense because these three-dimensional measurements can be very complex and if the refractive errors are severe then the measurements would be difficult to gather. The measurements for Custom LASIK surgery generate a 3D diagram that maps the way your eyes process images-thus the term "custom."

The result of custom LASIK surgery is that the volume of visual ability is improved and additionally, the quality of visual ability is improved. It is a solution to reducing the occurrence of problems that are post-LASIK such as night vision difficulty, glare, halos, and forks.

The technology of Custom LASIK has to do with what are called high-order and low-order aberrations. Traditional LASIK treats low-order aberrations which are associated with the refractive errors of nearsightedness (myopia), farsightedness (hyperopia), and astigmatism. The low-order aberrations have to do with how much you are able to see. The methodology involves using a wavefront device to transmit a safe ray of light into your eye which reflects back bouncing off the retina. The pattern of this reflection will give information as to the metrics of the high- and low-order aberrations and this information is used to generate the three-dimensional map.

The high-order aberrations have to do with vision irregularities other than myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism. When high-order aberrations are corrected, you get an improvement in the quality of your vision. Custom LASIK surgery works on the high-order aberrations as well as the low-order aberrations.

There is a potential for Custom LASIK surgery to be able to fix problems that might have arisen or were not fixed with a prior traditional refractive LASIK surgery. This is because a different set of measurements are now available with the custom LASIK surgery that will address the high-order aberrations this time.

One problem that occurs with traditional LASIK surgery is that patients have a difficult time seeing in dimly-lit areas. This referred to as contrast sensitivity and Custom LASIK surgery does a better job at fixing that problem.

Overall, with Custom LASIK surgery, there is a better chance of fixing other annoying results of traditional LASIK surgery such as only being able to achieve near 20/20 (there is a better chance of achieving 20/20) and fixing night vision problems. Night vision problems seem to plague many patients of traditional LASIK and this makes it very difficult if not impossible for them to drive.