Eye Test. Photo by Jacqueline Griffiths, MD. (PRNewsFoto)

Washington, Sept 19: Patients, who undergo LASIK surgery may soon not need to go to the doctor repeatedly to adjust their vision, as Ophthalmologists have developed a new formula to help surgeons get it right the first time round.

The new results, presented at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting in London, are the result of a complex computer formula compiled by doctors and scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center that takes into account myriad imperfections within the eye that weren't even known to exist a decade ago.

Even though most patients come out of refractive surgery with vision that is 20/20 or better, doctors have noticed that some patients exit the surgery slightly farsighted. Such trouble is though not enough to seriously degrade the patients' quality of vision or to require contact lenses or reading glasses, but enough to be a leading reason for them to complain about the results of the surgery.

A few others end up slightly nearsighted. While many of these patients still see at a level around 20/20, the slight farsightedness or nearsightedness is is one of the chief barriers preventing them from seeing even better, at a level around 20/16.

Eye surgeon Scott MacRae, M.D., of the University of Rochester Eye Institute presented the results showing a dramatic drop in farsightedness among LASIK patients.

While some doctors have noticed that patients are more likely to be slightly farsighted than nearsighted after LASIK, doctors have had no way to predict which patients would be affected. But the new formula takes the guesswork out of the picture and establishes a scientific basis for the phenomenon.

The software developed by Venkiteshwar and MacRae controls how the laser beam dances around the surface of the cornea during a LASIK procedure, allowing the surgeon to sculpt the cornea into just the right shape so that it produces as flawless an image as possible.

The new formula has opened the door, for the first time in history, to the possibility of fixing not only the three major flaws in the eye that reading glasses and contact lenses have corrected for decades, but also approximately 60 additional imperfections that were never known before.

"This is not something anyone would have predicted. When you fix these flaws, it can affect vision in ways that were previously unpredictable," MacRae, who is a professor of Ophthalmology and of Visual Science, said. (ANI)