Abstract
Purpose :
Higher order aberrations (HOA) can decrease visual quality and can exist naturally or are induced by procedures such as refractive surgery. Studies have compared HOA in microkeratome vs. femtosecond (FS) corneal flap creation, but no studies have compared two FS lasers. The purpose of this study is to compare HOA induced by two femtosecond lasers, the ZD4 and iFS, used to create corneal flaps for LASIK.
Methods :
14 eyes with corneal flaps created by the ZD4 laser for LASIK were compared to 14 eyes with corneal flaps created by the iFS laser. The two groups of eyes were similar in age, gender, spherical equivalent (SE), and treatment laser. The difference between the pre-operative and three month post-operative root mean squared (RMS) of HOA was used to compare the higher order aberrations. The paired t-test was used to test difference between the RMS in the iFS and ZD4 eyes. The P-value was Bonferroni corrected.
Results :
There is not a statistically significant difference in means of RMS values between eyes that had corneal flap creation with the ZD4 and iFS lasers (p>0.05). The improvement of SE was also similar between the two groups.
Conclusions :
Based on our results both ZD4 and iFS lasers do not induce significant changes in HOA after corneal flap creation for LASIK surgery.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.