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DR. HELEN WU: One of our most popular procedures is laser vision correction, which could be either Lasik or surface ablation, otherwise known as PRK. People seeking laser vision correction are those that wear glasses or contact lenses for nearsightedness or farsightedness or astigmatism, and without their glasses or contact lenses, they're unable to function well.

With Lasik what we're doing is we're creating a flap in the cornea. The cornea is the front surface of the eye where we put a contact lens so that's the clear window of the eye if you will. So what we do is we create a flap. We reflect it up and then we use a laser to reshape the surface of the eye, and then we put the flap back down. And that allows the light to come into focus closer to the retina which is where it should come into focus.

The laser is individualized to each patient. And that's the new, that's the state of the art advance is the customized Lasik treatment. So the customized Lasik allows you to take a map of the abnormalities or the abhorrations of each individual eye and then use that information to treat the eye afterwards. So not only will you treat your nearsightedness or farsightedness or your astigmatism but it will also treat the finer irregularities in the vision.

As far as the effectiveness of this procedure, generally, people experience about 80% of their total effect in the first 24 hours. So when they wake up the next day, they can see their alarm clock. They can go to work. They can come get their eyes checked. They can drive themselves. Their functional on the next day, and there's not discomfort associated with the procedure on the second day. On the first day, there's very minimal discomfort so it's very easy for the patient afterwards. So over weeks to month's time, then, the vision slowly improves the additional 20%, the contrast sensitivity, the night vision, all of that improves over three to six months' time.

We use the state of the art technology with our laser vision correction patients. The current generation lasers use a small flying spot which allows us to correct finer degrees of high order abhorrations or irregularities in the eye. The older generation lasers used a broad beam, and the total ablation zone size was only up to 6 or 6 1/2 mm. So people, for example, with very wide pupils might have had problems with driving at night with a lot of halos and glare. Fortunately now, our optical zones go out to 9 mm. so we really don't have that problem at all anymore.

Well, I've been doing this procedure for 15 years. I was the one who, in our center at Tufts New England Medical Center we were one of the original centers to do the original trials in PRK and Lasik.