RNS: Femtosecond laser, July 2008
TIME: 2:00
URL: http://www2.med.umich.edu/prmc/media/newsroom/details.cfm?ID=377
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Femtosecond laser could change the face of corneal transplant surgery
Early results show laser – developed at U-M for eye surgeries – improving corneal transplant outcomes
Suggested lead: A super-fast and high-tech laser developed for use in eye surgery at U-M Kellogg Eye Center could change the face of corneal eye transplant surgery. Here’s Andi McDonnell with more.
Faster recovery times and better visual outcomes are among the early results of a corneal transplant pilot study underway at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center.
Researchers at Kellogg were first to discover in the early 1990s that the femtosecond laser - then used for industrial purposes - had great potential for use in eye surgeries that traditionally required a surgical blade or knife.
Today, after further development, it is widely used for refractive surgery. And now, experts hope for the same success in applying this exceptionally fast and precise laser to cornea transplant surgery.
Dr. Shahzad I. Mian (M.D.), principle study investigator and assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Kellogg, tells us…
“We hope that with the use of the femtosecond laser patients will have better vision, faster recovery of vision and stronger wound construction, which will allow them to be more resistant to injury in the future.”
Lasers have been effective in eye surgeries for decades. However, they were not used for corneal transplants until the femtosecond laser was shown to be a superior cutting tool to the trephine, the cookie cutter-like knife currently used for transplants.
According to Dr. Mian…
“The advantage with this laser is that it’s able to cut tissue deeply in the cornea and results in minimal injury to the surrounding tissue and therefore, allows us to make these deep cuts but it also allows us to pattern these cuts into shapes that allow better customized overlap between the donor corneal tissue and the patient’s corneal tissue.”
Because of the speed and precision of the femtosecond laser, Mian says the study results to date for corneal transplant surgery have been very encouraging, If these results hold true, a larger, multi-center clinical trial comparing this procedure to the traditional method of performing transplants could follow.
Andi McDonnell, U-M Health System News.
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