If you wear glasses or contacts, Dr. Liva has great news for you: LASIK eye surgery can help you see more clearly without prescription lenses! Although there is an important minority that should not have LASIK, for most people the procedure provides outstanding results. Most patients are able to see without glasses or contacts after surgery. LASIK is quick and relatively painless — two other important benefits!
Dr. Liva performs LASIK eye surgery in his office in a climate-controlled laser suite with the most advanced technology available as evidenced by his recent acquisition of his state-of-the-art ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q Excimer Laser System. The Wavelight is Dr. Liva’s third excimer laser in ten years demonstrating his committment to providing his patents with the latest and best technology. Dr. Liva has chosen to use the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q System because it provides unique features which increase the safety and diminish the chance of complications after LASIK. Here are some of the advantages:
Perfect Pulse Technologyâ„¢
PerfectPulse Technology™ represents a new approach to laser vision correction. It accounts for much of the speed, precision, and safety of the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q laser and offers improvements that are revolutionary in the field. Smart energy control measures and adjusts energy levels in the laser pulse from creation to delivery. High-speed eye tracking charts the eye’s movement 400 times per second. As a result, every laser pulse is completely controlled, allowing for the most accurate level of correction possible.
Smart Energy Control
You can have peace of mind that the amount of energy in the laser has been calibrated to exactly the right level. After the beam has been created, it passes through three checkpoints on its way to your eye. At each of these points, the energy level is checked and adjusted if necessary, ensuring that the beam is perfectly attuned at its destination.
The ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q laser is essentially a precise, controlled beam of energy. The laser employs a proprietary overlapping method to ensure accurate laser placement, and is one of the ways that ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q is able to achieve a rounder, more natural corneal surface than many other lasers used for vision correction.
Eye Tracking Technology
Due to the remarkable speed of both the eye and the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q procedure, the laser beam needs to be constantly and minutely adjusted to the position of the eye at any given time. Every four to six milliseconds, the eye’s location is measured and the internal mirrors of the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q are automatically aligned. Just before the pulse is released, a second check is made to confirm that the eye has not moved. This happens 400 times every second, once for every laser pulse. If, at any time, the eye moves too quickly to be measured or moves out of range, the laser will stop and wait for the eye to move back into position.
Speed
Currently, the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q is the fastest vision correction laser for LASIK available in the United States. At 400 laser bursts per second, it takes only about two seconds of treatment to correct one diopter. Of course, spending less time under the laser means less stress and discomfort for the patient.
Wavefront Optimizedâ„¢ Technology
One of the most innovative features of the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q is the way it uses Wavefront Optimized™ technology to automatically compensate for the curvature of the cornea. In earlier laser correction systems, the “optical zone,†or area of correction, was centered on the front of the cornea; the result was a flattened circular area that ended with an abrupt edge, causing unwanted side effects like poor night vision, glare, and halos.
The ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q changes all that. The ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q sends extra pulses to the peripheral corneal area in order to compensate for the angle of the laser beam. In this manner, the aspherical shape of the cornea is preserved to a degree that older lasers simply could not achieve. This compensation, combined with the incredibly small, 1mm size of the laser, produces a smooth, effective optical zone that results in what can only be described as seeing like never before. Imagine a glass ball. If you took a flashlight and aimed it directly at the top of the ball, the light would form a circular shape on the surface of the ball. If you now aimed the flashlight towards the side of the ball, the light would form an elliptical shape and not seem as bright anymore. This is because the same amount of light is suddenly distributed over a larger area, and some of the light is reflected away due to the angled surface of the glass ball.
Large Optical Zones
The ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q is capable of producing some of the largest available optical zones. The optical zone refers to the portion of the cornea that has been corrected by the laser. A larger optical zone is especially important for night vision and for patients with very large pupils. If a patient’s pupil is larger than the optical zone, they may experience poor peripheral vision, poor night vision, and a higher than normal incidence of halos and glare. In the past, this has been one of the biggest drawbacks to conventional laser correction surgery. Wavefront Optimized™ technology built into the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q addresses this limitation.
Better Night Vision and Glare Control
At night and in dark conditions, the pupil becomes larger to permit the maximum amount of light to enter the eye. Laser eye correction needs to take this fact into account. If the optical zone is smaller than the size of the pupil at its largest, there is a good chance that the patient will experience poor night vision or problems with glare and halos around bright objects such as oncoming headlights. ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q is able to produce a larger optical zone, virtually eliminating glare and night vision problems associated with older generation lasers.
Clinical Results
When it was approved in 2003 as the first new laser in five years, the FDA granted the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® the widest approval range ever initially given to a new laser for both myopic and hyperopic vision correction. Since then, the results have been astoundingly positive. On gaining FDA approval in 2006, the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q took this tradition of excellence another step forward, providing proven superior clinical results, as shown by the following statistics:
- At one year after treatment,more than 93% of patients said they saw at least as well as or better than they had with glasses or contacts before treatment.
- More than 98% of patients achieved 20/40 vision one year after treatment; 20/40 is the level of visual acuity required to pass most driving tests.
- Nearly 60% of near-sighted patients achieved 20/16 vision after one year of treatment.
- Both near- and far-sighted patients reported an improvement in their reaction to bright lights and night driving glare after ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q treatments. In addition, near-sighted patients reported an improvement in sensitivity to light.
- Predictable results are the norm for the ALLEGRETTO WAVE® Eye-Q. More than 90% of patients achieve refraction within 1 diopter of their target correction.