COMING - THE ‘THINKING’ LASER MACHINE
A leading British eye surgeon has told doctors here that scientists in Japan are developing a laser machine that can track the split-second movement of the eye it is operating on.
Until it is ready, the surgeon using delicate laser surgery on the eye has to instantly react and remove his foot from the laser pedal if the patient’s eye suddenly flickers.
Dr. Charles Cory, lecturing to Queensland opthamologists, forecast that lasers will also soon be able to correct long-sightedness as well as short-sightedness.
Dr. Cory had been demonstrating the 30-second operation he does eight times a day at his London clinic. With two other colleagues, the clinic operates on an average 24 patients a day charging patients about $800 an eye.
His delicate laser eye surgery reshapes the front surface of the cornea by shooting a laser beam into the eye, "slicing off" a fraction of the corneal tissue to correct short-sightedness. New laser machines being developed will "dig a trench" around the cornea to make it steeper. Ninety-five percent of his patients left the clinic satisfied with the procedure to correct their vision, he said; but there were some risks, such as hazy vision. ‘What we do with the laser is very precise; what the cornea does about healing is less predictable.
‘I have performed the operation on my son, my daughter and my niece. I am certainly in favour of it; but I haven’t had it myself,’ said the doctor, who wears spectacles.
‘I am often asked why I need glasses. I am short-sighted, but I have reached the age when I would still have to wear glasses for reading. This is the problem when you have reached the 50-mark. Even if you have perfect eyesight for distance, you need glasses to read or look at your computer keyboard or your VDU, which are on different focal planes. I can take my glasses off and still read. But there is no advantage in having the operation done on my own eyes.’
Dr. Cory said he had been an eye surgeon for 35 years, and his father was an eye surgeon before him. ‘We both went through the stage of operating on patients’ eyes, without wearing rubber gloves; our touch had to be so sensitive. These days in general eye surgery the gloves have been much improved and we wear them.’
Dr. Cory has performed laser surgery on 2,000 patients in 3 1/2 years. ‘We have had problems; one or two failures. Most of them relate back to the early laser machines we used.’ The machines he and two colleagues use at their London clinic cost $720,000 each and are made in Japan.
When the surgeon prepares to operate with laser, he first has to feed precise information into the machine’s computer on where it will work on the cornea. ‘The real work comes before that,’ says Dr. Cory, ‘deciding what you are going to do and who you are going to do it to. During the operation patients are told not to move their heads and that their eyes must remain still. There is a flashing green fixation light inside the machine and they watch it. And you watch them. The machine carries out its instructions precisely. If the eye does move, you quickly take your foot off the pedal. You’ve got to be awake. Soon we expect to have machines that track the movement of the eye.’
When Dr. Cory performs general eye surgery, where he operates for corneal graft and cataract on people who are nearly blind, he says it still gives him a thrill when the patient announces he has regained sight. ‘It is fantastic.’
