Your eyes and your vision are as unique as your fingerprints or your DNA, but until now laser vision correction has used the same diagnostic information used to prescribe contact lenses and glasses. Now, for the first time, Grossnickle Eye Center offers the custom LASIK Wavefront mapping, a unique "fingerprint of your vision".

Normally, when we measure people for glasses, contacts and laser corrective surgery we measure the average of their whole eye. So if we say someone is minus three diopters that is an average of what their refraction is across the whole of their eye. All of our current technologies give us the average and for most people this average measurement provides good vision with glasses, contacts or laser vision correction. In reality if we measure someone who is a minus three in their glasses, they are not. Parts of the eye are minus 2.8, parts of their eye are a minus 3 and parts of their eye are minus 3.2. All of our current technologies give us an average.

To give people the most absolutely precise vision possible, we should give a different correction at each point. The places that are minus 2.8 should be corrected as minus 2.8. The places minus 3.2 should be corrected at minus 3.2. Our technologies until now have not been able to do this. Glasses can't do it; contacts can't do it. The reason is that they give correction over the entire lens. What custom LASIK wavefront mapping allows us to do, when we combine it with the VISX Star S4 Active Trak laser is a very precise correction at each point on the eye, so that each point of the eye gets the correction that it needs.

Until now, standard laser vision correction has treated "second order" optical aberrations, which is just a fancy term for irregularities primarily involving your cornea and the length of your eye that are responsible for vision problems like nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. But this conventional approach does not analyze your complete vision from cornea to retina, including the tear film. It does not take into account the eyes so called "higher-order aberrations"  - that is the subtle variations of the eyes decrease the quality of your vision without necessarily decreasing your ability to see the letters of an eye chart.

The custom LASIK Wavefront mapping measures these higher-order distortions with amazing accuracy. Custom LASIK Wavefront mapping data reveals the way the eye's entire optical system processes light. That's important, because the eyes subtle imperfections affect the quality that projects onto the retina and can be a major factor in vision quality.

The custom LASIK Wavefront mapping system begins projecting light rays onto your eye. Those light rays make up what is called a "wavefront" that travels toward the back of the eye, all the while subject to distortions produced by the eyes various structures.

Using a sensor containing hundreds of microscopic optical lenses, custom LASIK wavefront mapping measures how much your optical system distorts the wavefront by comparing it with the "virgin" wavefront, which is undistorted before it enters the eye. These sophisticated measurements produce a pictorial and numerical "fingerprint" of the entire eyes optical distortions, permitting an accurate assessment of your unique visual profile.

This diagnostic information, used in conjunction with other tests such as standard vision chart and corneal topography, allows our physicians first to determine if you are a good candidate for laser vision correction and if so if personalizing your treatment can provide a better result than standard laser correction.  Based on the information captured by the custom LASIK Wavefront mapping system the eye surgeon can make subtle changes in treatment settings to the excimer laser, to reshape the corneal curvature with greater precision than has been possible up to now.

Use of the custom LASIK Wavefront mapping system opens the path to the therapeutic application of laser vision application of laser vision correction technology. It gives doctors the ability to correct more complex visual conditions, and may be potentially help patients whose previous laser vision procedures didn't produce the desired refractive results.