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The LadarVision4000®
The Eye Tracker
CustomCornea® Treatments
The Micro-keratome
Here at Ashford Advanced Eye Care, the most advanced technology in Laser Vision Correction is used, ensuring our surgeons are able to utilize cutting edge technology and enabling our patients to achieve their best visual outcome possible.
The Laser Beam
The laser device used here is the LADARVision®4000. This system allows our surgeons to reshape your cornea, on a microscopic level. During the procedure, the surgeon will be viewing the treatment as it progresses through a microscope. It makes sense then, the smaller and more accurate the laser is, the more accurately the cornea can be reshaped.
The LADARVision®4000 uses a small flying spot laser that is 0.8mm wide. This enables the system to remove and reshape the cornea in very minute amounts, and allows for smooth and measured reshaping of the cornea within the treatment area. Consequently this highly precise laser allows our surgeon to position laser beams exactly where they are needed in order to correct your vision.
 
The Eye Tracker
Keeping your eyes still during LVC is very important in order for each laser pulse to be targeted in the correct place on the cornea. Even when you think your eyes are completely still and not moving at all, they still make minute, unpredictable, and involuntary movements. Therefore a tracking device is employed to allow the laser beam to compensate for these minute eye movements, and still be able to deliver treatment simultaneously.
The LADARVision®4000 uses a closed loop tracking system (known as the LADARTracker) to track the movements of the eye. The LADARTracker works by taking a number of measurements or ‘samples’ of the eye position and adjusting the laser beam accordingly. To be effective and keep the laser beam on the desired target area, the tracker needs to sample the eye’s position at a rate of at least 1000 times per second. For the entire duration of the procedure, the LADARTracker samples the eye position 4000 times per second, four times the recommended requirement. This ensures accuarate placement of the laser beam.
While the LADARTracker samples eye movements 4000 times per second, the other type of tracking is video based or open loop tracking. Systems operating on this type of tracking can only sample at around 200 times per second. This means that no video based tracking system is able to detect and adjust the laser beam for involuntary eye movements. Therefore, open loop tracking systems are generally used only for safety, and do not contribute to better results through improved accuracy.
The technology utilized by the LADARVision®4000 makes it markedly different from other LVC lasers. This particular laser system is the only modern system within the industry to feature closed loop eye tracking in combination with an extremely accurate small beam laser. You can be confident that here at Ashford Advanced Eye Care, our surgeons use the most advanced technology to achieve the desired results from your treatment.
CustomCornea® TREATMENTS
Laser vision correction has been proven to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatisim with excellent results. These visual conditions are known as lower order aberrations, and are generally corrected without difficulty by either PRK or LASIK techniques of LVC.
There are some visual problems that were until recently, not measurable by conventional means. These are called higher order aberrations. It is commonly believed that higher order aberrations are the main contributor to visual disturbances such as glare and haloes at night or in low light conditions from bright lights. These aberrations can not be treated with conventional LVC techniques, or with the help of glasses or contacts.
CustomCornea® is a new type of procedure that uses PRK or LASIK in a more specific fashion than in conventional treatments. CustomCornea® is the first LVC technique to go further than re shaping your cornea based upon your glasses or contact lens prescription. The technique is completely customized to your own eyes.
CustomCornea® procedure contains three mains steps:
1. A machine known as a wavefront device is used to capture and detect your own eyes’ combination of lower and higher order abberations. The LADARWave® measures light rays as they enter and exit each eye.
2. A virtual wavefront map of each eye is generated which inturn is loaded into the laser unit and converted as a guide for the laser beam. When the procedure is ready to commence our sugeon aligns the eye in that same orientation as it was on the LADARWave®, ensuring accuracy. As each eye has a separate and exclusive wavefront map, the treatment is completely individual.
3. The cornea is then reshaped using the LADARVision4000® laser, guided by the plan derived from the wavefront map. The technique is able to correct lower and higher order aberrations simulateously.
So by using the wavefront device, it is possible to measure and record the unique characteristics of each of your eyes, and customize your treatment. With the wavefront maps that are generated and loaded into the laser system, the laser is able to derive a treatment plan that is extremely precise, but more importantly, unique to your own eyes. This in combination with the advanced LADARTracker®, means you can be confident that our surgeons are able to utilize the most adavanced technology today to help you achieve your optimal visual outcome.
The Microkeratome
The microkeratome device used here at Ashford Advanced Eye Care is an Amadeus™ Microkeratome.
The microkaratome is used to create the corneal flap for a lasik procedure. There are a number of features of this device that make it an instument of choice for our surgeons.
- The device is one handed which means that once the device is placed onto the eye there is no further assembly needed before the flap is created.
- The flap created hinges from the nasal side, which in terms of healing is beneficial for nerve fibre repair.
- Allows the surgeon to create a larger flap which means that the treatment area is larger ( favourable for a improved visual outcome).
- This particular device allows for individual settings for the movement of the cutting head and blade oscilation, due to seperate motor units for each. This allows the surgeon to retain greater contol over the device.
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