Wavefront technology is revolutionary because it potentially improves not only how much the patient sees, as indexed by the 20/20 eye chart, but also how well the patient sees, in terms of contrast sensitivity and fine detail. Consequently, risks of post-LASIK complications such as glare, halos, and difficulty with night vision are substantially diminished.

While traditional LASIK can treat vision defects or lower-order aberrations linked with common refractive errors such as myopia or astigmatism, it cannot treat those visual distortions known as higher-order aberrations. This is significant because higher-order aberrations can induce problems such as diminished contrast sensitivity, poor night vision, glare, and halos. With the groundbreaking wavefront technology, there is also the potential now to provide treatment for patients who have previously undergone LASIK, PRK, or RK surgery and subsequently lost best-corrected vision.

The key to wavefront lasik is the ABERROMETER (picture above), a sophisticated machinery with its roots in astrophysics that is used to create a digital "thumbprint" of the corneas minute irregularities. This optical map of the eye so to speak is then incorporated into the laser treatment plan to enhance the already outstanding results of standard plano-scan lasik. But not all patients need Wavefront Lasik. As a general rule, those above 45 years with evidence of early cataract and those with only small amounts of higher order aberrations do not need it.

At Clearvision Eye Clinic, all patients for Lasik evaluation are routinely assessed with the aberrometer for suitability for Wavefront Lasik.