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Speaker: Adaptive optics before presbyLASIK improves depth of focus
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CHICAGO – PresbyLASIK with adaptive optics before surgery can provide asphericity and improve depth of focus, a speaker told colleagues here.
“Visual outcomes after presbyLASIK can really be affected by different optical and [neurological] factors,” Pablo Artal, MD, PhD, said at Refractive Subspecialty Day preceding the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting. “Adaptive optics, I believe, is a very powerful approach for presbyLASIK to really optimize the treatment before surgery.”
Normally, introducing asphericity in the cornea reduces image quality at distance, Artal said.
“However, for near, when you induce asphericity in the cornea, image quality increases,” he said. “So, we are going to have this balance: reducing some image quality for distance, increasing some image quality for near.”
PresbyLASIK may yield unpredictable visual outcomes, depending on many factors, Artal said.
“The initial factor is how your laser can’t really reproduce the amount of asphericity you want to have,” Artal said.
Adaptive optics can be used to design a guided ablation profile for presbyLASIK by combining aberrometry and visual testing, Artal said.
“You are providing stimuli through the eye . . . and you can do visual testing when you are inducing, in a noninvasive way, a different amount of spherical aberration,” he said.
PresbyLASIK is not approved in the U.S. by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Disclosure: Artal is a consultant for Abbott Medical Optics, Calhoun Vision, Comtateq, London Eye Pharma, Visiometrics and Voptica.