"We have a commitment to our patients, to do the very best for them that we can," said MacRae. "We've taken an extraordinarily safe, effective procedure and made it even more effective, not only for our patients here in Rochester, but for patients around the world who will have access to this technology."
The FDA approval is the latest development in a nearly 20-year-long project by University scientists and physicians to study and improve human vision.
In the early 1990s, scientist David Williams, Ph.D., director of the Center for Visual Science, began a series of experiments to look into the eye in unprecedented detail, not only to see the organ's fine structures but also to understand how light moves around inside the eye.
His pioneering work opened the door, for the first time in history, to the possibility of fixing not only the three major flaws in the eye that reading glasses and contact lenses have corrected for decades, but also approximately 60 additional imperfections that were never known before. Nearly everyone has these flaws in their eyes to some extent; while most people don't notice them, they hurt our quality of vision in subtle ways.
MacRae, an internationally recognized refractive surgeon, moved to Rochester in 2000 from Portland, Ore., to help bring the developments to the bedsides of patients and give them a quality of eyesight that was not possible before Williams' work. Through a series of clinical trials and work in the laboratory, the Rochester team did just that.
The team helped to create a field known as customized ablation, a form of LASIK that corrects subtle imperfections, bringing about a super-crisp quality of eyesight. Beyond making vision on the order of 20/15 or 20/16 possible or even commonplace in some groups of patients, the technology also increases the eye's ability to see in situations where there is low light
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| Contact: Tom Rickey tom_rickey@urmc.rochester.edu 585-275-7954 University of Rochester Medical Center Source:Eurekalert |