Just space: a new laser in St. Petersburg returns sight in seconds

Now no one will even say when people first encountered poor eyesight. But attempts to fight this scourge were made by mankind in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, where glass balls filled with water were used as magnifying glasses. Years passed, lorgnets, monocles, glasses, contact lenses appeared, finally. But people wanted not just to correct myopia or hyperopia, but forever, preferably quickly and painlessly, to get rid of bad eyesight.

Surgeons tried to “scratch the eye” at the end of the 1985th century, but the first operation for laser vision correction was carried out only in XNUMX. Since then, technologies have been constantly improved, and laser vision correction has firmly entered our daily life. So much so that a potential patient is now rarely interested in the technical capabilities of a laser system. And it is completely in vain, because the success of the operation depends on this, as well as on the qualifications of the ophthalmologist.

Not so long ago in the St. Petersburg branch of the MNTK “Eye Microsurgery” them. Academician Svyatoslav Fedorov installed innovative equipment developed in Germany – a new generation excimer laser SCHWIND Amaris 1050RS.

The installation, thanks to the built-in tracking system, detects eye movements at a speed of 1050 times per second in six dimensions, and the seventh dimension is an algorithm that “predicts” the next position of the eye in which it will be at the moment of contact with the laser.

“The eye can deviate left and right, up and down, and also forward and backward. The slightest deviation, literally by a micron, can disrupt the accuracy of the operation. The SCHWIND Amaris 1050RS laser, thanks to the built-in intelligent foresight system, allows to increase the accuracy of the laser effect by some fractions, but at the same time to increase the real percentage of improvement in vision and, as a result, to obtain the final visual acuity, so that the patient can even see craters on the Moon, “says the director of the St. Petersburg branch, Doctor of Medical Sciences Ernest Boyko.

At the same time, it takes an average of 1,3 seconds to correct one diopter. At such speeds, the operation, depending on the number of diopters in the patient, can last from 2 to 10 seconds. The most comfortable and gentle mode! Excimer lasers of previous generations coped with a similar task 3-4 times slower. “You must admit that it is one thing to keep your eyes motionless for 10 seconds and quite another to keep your eyes still for a minute,” Boyko stressed.

“This laser allows you to correct all possible anomalies of eye refraction, get rid of hyperopia, myopia, astigmatism, superficial changes in the cornea after previous injuries and inflammations, allows you to cure keratoconus and remove glasses even with age-related presbyopia,” added the head of the department of refractive surgery and corneal pathology , ophthalmic surgeon of the highest category Alexey Titov.

Since the installation of the latest equipment, the clinic has already carried out several hundred operations. Emotions go off scale not only among patients, but also among surgeons.

“The speed is fantastic. At the same time, very high accuracy. All eye displacements are taken into account. It’s just space, – the head of the department of refractive surgery and contact correction, ophthalmic surgeon of the highest category, Andrey Kachanov, did not hide his emotions. “Few clinics in the world have such excellent capabilities for the most accurate and fast correction with a wide range of refractive errors – from hyperopia to myopia and mixed astigmatism.”