Dr. Hummel - Vision Blog

Both Traditional LASIK and Custom LASIK give excellent vision improvement. But Custom LASIK uses more sophisticated diagnostic equipment when mapping your two eyes before treatment. It uses Wavefront technology. There are three companies which make Wavefront systems and we use the one made by VISX called CustomVue.

To create your treatment plan, we need to know exactly how your eyes are currently shaped. The more precisely we can map your two eyes, the more precisely we can treat them. The information in the two 3-D maps is what guides the excimer laser in treatment, since laser, Wavefront diagnostics, computer, microscope, and even your patient chair are all connected in the overall CustomVue system.

To form the 3D maps, each eye is diagnosed separately. For each, a light is shone into it which travels in waves that line up straight at the front end (the “wavefront”). This light reflects back from your eye to the CustomVue system, but the wavefront is no longer straight. It is now irregular. No human eye is microscopically perfect in its roundness, and each eye has tiny variations in its contours. So some light rays return a little ahead of others, in a distinctive pattern. Each eye is unique, which is why these maps are often likened to a fingerprint.

When you have your eyes tested for glasses or contacts, you will get a prescription that thousands, maybe millions, of other people also have. That’s because traditional prescriptions are far less precise than Wavefront diagnostics. Your two 3-D maps and the treatments they subsequently guide are yours alone. This is why Wavefront-guided LASIK is called Custom LASIK.