About a week ago, I attended a seminar “Visual-Simulated Imaging” by Prof. Brian A. Barsky at my university. The professor introduced a method or technique which I think will be a breakthrough (or, already have ?) in optometry. In short, by using a device, we can get the ‘almost’ complete data of our eyes, including the curvature and aberration in the cornea. The data is then feeded to a 3D rendering engine, and will render a 3D scene which looks like exactly what the patient sees. The optometrist can diagnose better by examining the rendering result. It’s expected that this method will replace the traditional method using eye chart as in the traditional way the patient can only say what alphabet he sees even sometimes it’s the result of a guessing. Moreover, the patient can’t describe correctly the error in his vision (e.g. , it’s a bit blurred …But, how blurred ? Blurred to which direction ? etc.).

There’s an interesting revelation in the seminar, the result of doing LASIK. First of all, the patient can expect better vision after doing the LASIK, however, the vision itself still isn’t a perfect one. Secondly, after doing LASIK, we can’t use eyeglasses to make our vision better anymore. And the most fatal one, LASIK may induce higher-order (simply speaking, the more damaging) aberration to our eyes in which eyeglasses are useless if we thought of using them to correct the new vision problem. But, no need to worry, the LASIK technique improves from day to day, so it’s expected that this problem is corrected in the near future.

Check out Prof. Brian A. Barsky’s website : http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~barsky/