Wavefront LASIK / Custom LASIK Surgery is available to these Northern California locations:
San Francisco Bay - San Jose - Berkeley - Oakland - Marin County
ScottHyver Visioncare offers free information about Wavefront LASIK eye surgery and custom laser vision correction for San Francisco, San Jose, Berkeley, Oakland, and Marin County residents interested in custom LASIK surgery.
Wavefront LASIK — also known as Custom LASIK — is the most advanced laser vision correction treatment available. Throughout San Francisco and Northern California, Wavefront LASIK is fast becoming the procedure of choice for qualifying patients. And it's no wonder: this procedure has helped many patients achieve 20/20 or better sight, with sharper, clearer night vision, without depending on their glasses or contact lenses.
Dr. Hyver performs Wavefront LASIK on the industry-leading VISX S4 laser, in Daly City, serving our San Francisco clientele, in Santa Clara, serving our San Jose patients, and in San Ramon, for the convenience of our East Bay and Walnut Creek clientele.
This Resource Center is designed to help educate you on the cost/benefits of Wavefront LASIK (or Custom LASIK), so you can make a more informed choice given your vision correction options. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of confusion about custom technology in the marketplace, with some Custom LASIK surgeons in San Jose and San Francisco obscuring the differences between true wavefront-guided treatment, and treatment based on older generation technology.
It's the intent of this Resource Center to clearly spell out these differences, so you precisely understand what Wavefront is and isn't. To further your Wavefront LASIK education, order a free copy of Dr. Hyver’s new DVD, Exploring Laser Vision Correction, which follows two San Francisco 49ers through the pre-op, surgical and post-op stages of their Wavefront treatment (order your DVD now).
The Goal of Wavefront LASIK
Nearly 60 million Americans today suffer from nearsightedness, farsightedness, and/or astigmatism — the inability to focus light precisely on the retina because of optical defects of the eye. These structural defects are known as lower-order aberrations, and they are corrected with glasses, contact lenses, and conventional laser eye surgery like LASIK. The degree of correction is measured as a quantity, with 20/20 considered normal vision.
For example, one of our Wavefront LASIK patients in San Francisco came to the clinic with uncorrected visual acuity of 20/200, meaning that standing "20" feet away from an eye chart, he could just resolve a size "200" letter, a letter far bigger than the size "20" letter of normal vision. This patient is nearsighted, and thus cannot see distant objects well.
There is a second category of optical defects, called higher-order aberrations, that represent residual irregularities in the optical structure of the eye. Higher-order aberrations affect the quality of vision, and are primarily responsible for problems of contrast sensitivity, night glare, halos, and other disturbances.
For example, one of our Wavefront LASIK patients in San Jose could see relatively well during the day, but her night vision was so bad she couldn't drive. In her case, the quantity of her vision was good, but the quality was poor.
The goal of Wavefront, then, is to improve a patient's overall vision quantity and quality by, one, eliminating the lower order aberrations of nearsightedness and astigmatism; and two, by reducing, or at least not increasing, higher order aberrations. Keep in mind that of the time of this writing, only the VISX S4 Wavefront LASIK platform, the system used by Dr. Hyver, is approved for the correction of all three prescription types: nearsightedness, farsightedness, and mixed astigmatism.
The Diagnostic Process
VISX Wavescan Aberrometer |
Wavefront LASIK would not be possible without a measuring device called an aberrometer, which generates a complete aberration map of the eye, consisting of both lower and higher order aberrations.
The aberrometer works like this: while you stare into its display, the aberrometer projects a harmless infrared laser beam on your retina. As the light reflects off your retina and washes over the internal structures of your eye, it emerges from your eye as a wavefront, which is captured by the aberrometer's lens array. The shape of this wavefront is uniquely yours, since no other person possesses exactly the same shape and structure of your eye.
Your wavefront map is then mathematically interpreted to describe the composition of your vision error. For example, among our San Francisco Custom LASIK patients, we've seen higher order aberrations readings representing as much as 30% of a patient's total vision error.
Wavefront data can be used diagnostically for pre-operative screening and post-surgical analysis, and also as a basis to direct the operations of the laser during the treatment process (see below).
Aberrometers are expensive machines. There are some San Francisco surgeons, for example, who share a single machine. At ScottHyver Visioncare, we own and exclusively operate three high-performance, VISX Wavescan aberrrometers.
The Treatment Process
The diagnostic data produced by the aberrometer are imported into specialized wavefront treatment planning software. This software generates a "laser session" file that's transferred electronically to the computer controlling the laser. The session file contains the instructions that tell the laser where and for how long to operate on your cornea to correct your specific vision error.
By the way, as mentioned earlier, some Northern California doctors, for whatever reason, make it difficult for the patient to understand the differences between standard (aka conventional) LASIK and true Wavefront LASIK. The principal difference is described in the treatment process above: unlike standard LASIK, in Wavefront LASIK the aberrometer data are automatically imported into the treatment planning software, which then automatically generates the file that directs the laser's operation.
You may also be interested to know that, in the FDA clinical trials, the post-operative visual results of the Wavefront LASIK systems currently in the market varied considerably. For example, the percent nearsighted of patients who achieved 20/20 or better at six month post-op ranged from a low of 79.9% for Alcon LADARVision CustomCornea to a high of 95.8% for the VISX S4 CustomVue.
If you have any questions or need additional information on any aspect of this procedure, please call 800.454.2747 or order your copy of Dr. Hyver's Free LASIK DVD, Exploring Laser Vision Correction.
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