Intraoperative and early postoperative complication rate of over 1200 consecutive femtosecond laser cuts for LASIK

Session Details

Session Title: Moderated Poster Session: Refractive

Session Date/Time: Saturday 05/09/2015 | 14:00-15:00

Paper Time: 14:50

Venue: Poster Village: Pod 1

First Author: : T.Kohnen GERMANY

Co Author(s): :    L. Schwarz   O. Klaproth   M. Shajari        

Abstract Details

Purpose:

To evaluate cut complication rate intraoperatively and during the early postoperative period in myopic eyes which have undergone femtosecond laser (FS) cuts for LASIK.

Setting:

Department of Ophthalmology, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany.

Methods:

In 1208 eyes FS cuts were performed for myopic LASIK between 2006 and 2014 by the same surgeon (TK) using the Intralase FS60 (IntraLase -AMO, Irvine, California, USA). The procedures were evaluated regarding their intra- and postoperative complication rate. Subsequent laser ablations were performed by three different excimer lasers starting with Technolas Kerakor 217z (Bausch and Lomb, Chiron GmbH, Dornach, Germany), replaced by Schwind Amaris 500E (Schwind Eye-tech-solutions GmbH, Germany) in November 2009 and finally the Schwind Amaris 750S (Schwind Eye-tech-solutions GmbH, Germany) in October 2012. Clinical examination was carried out one day, one week and one month after surgery.

Results:

Intraoperatively, incomplete side-cuts were observed in 4 cases. 3 out of this 4 happened during first year of FS usage. Irregular, incomplete or thin flaps, buttonholes, gas breakthrough and free caps were not observed. Epithelial defects, limbal bleeding and decentered flaps were observed in 44, 12 and 5 eyes, respectively. Patients complained about dry eyes in 55, 208 and 267 cases, 1 day, 1 week and 1 month after surgery. DLK 1 was observed in 69, DLK 2 in 20 eyes one day and in 3 and 2 eyes one month after surgery. Epithelial in growth was seen in 20 eyes.

Conclusions:

Incomplete side-cuts were mainly observed during the first year of FS usage and became less despite higher number of patients being treated. No major cut complications were induced. This clearly underlines the superiority of FS in terms of safety in comparison to Microkeratome assisted LASIK. Thus, femtosecond laser generated flaps can be seen as gold standard in LASIK currently.

Financial Interest:

NONE