Ultralase Presents New Treatment Results At Winter ESCRS 2010, Budapest

LEEDS, England -- Ultralase, the vision correction specialist, presented its first set of results for a new treatment, Ultraelite, at the recent Winter meeting of the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons in Budapest.

Jay Dermott, Training and Clinical Research Manager at Ultralase, presented the findings on 13th February, to an international audience of industry leaders, experts and practitioners.

Since launching in July 2009, Ultraelite treatments have been provided with outstanding success rates of 99% achieving 20/20 quality binocular vision or better, and 100% achieving driving standard or better. Developed by Technolas PerfectVision, the Ultraelite procedure is the next evoluation of wavefront-guided laser vision correction.

The induction of night vision symptoms from the early non wavefront-customised laser eye surgery was addressed by the introduction of the 1st generation wavefront-guided treatments that addressed the issue of higher order aberration. However, there was evidence that this was not the entire story. Drs Scott MacRae and Geunyoung Yoon of the University of Rochester, New York (2006) examined the issue and discovered hyperopic overcorrections on five separate laser platforms. The problem at the heart of these findings was the fact that the aberrations shown in Figure 1 were not separate entities; they had mutual interactions that were not considered in the existing algorithms. As a result, 2nd generation wavefront treatments were developed to address the interaction of aberrations.There remained, however, a final hurdle to clear on the path the optimum visual performance. It was established by Holladay (1999) that a change in corneal asphericity would occur routinely following laser refractive surgery, and soon afterward Jimenez et al (2003) published an equation by which the amount of asphericity induced in a refractive treatment could be predicted.

Because not all higher order aberrations are equal, however, in their resultant effect on post-operative quality of vision, Subbaram et al.(2006) looked at how any resultant post-operative higher order aberrations affected distance vision and found that third-order aberration (trefoil and coma), along with spherical aberration, were most heavily implicated in the denigration of visual quality. Since coma may be considered to be a form of off-axis spherical aberration, it was clear that preventing the induction of spherical aberration would be a key element to examine. In the process, it is necessary to delve into the mathematics of the ellipse, because to bring about the best-ever visual outcomes in refractive surgery has taken a breakthrough not in medicine, nor laser physics or quantum mechanics, but in the computation of the corrective curve.

Jay Dermott said: “The Winter ESCRS in Budapest was a unique opportunity to share and discuss our clinical learnings with the leading specialists in our field. These results are truly outstanding and reinforce our position at the forefront of advances and development in the field of vision correction.

““As a business, we are constantly innovating and striving to be at the forefront of development within our industry. The development and monitoring of results for new treatments and techniques is central to our work, and essentially ensuring we are offering the best and most advanced treatments to our customers.”