First laser eye op to give patients ‘super-vision’ – with better than 20/20 eyesight after surgery

Patients with poor eyesight can achieve ‘super-vision’ thanks to the first ever personalised eye surgery.

The groundbreaking technology, performed for the first time in the UK today, creates a 3D digital clone of a patient’s eyes.

Treatment is then tailored to meet their specific needs, achieving better results than with current standard prescriptions for glasses laser eye surgery.

Experts believe it could become the standard treatment for thousands of patients treated for sight loss every year.

The digital clone, called an ‘Eyevatar’, duplicates how an individual sees.

This allows surgeons to operate virtually ‘many times over to perfect the results’ before it is performed on the patient.

Astonishingly, trials have suggested the treatment — which costs £6,500 for both eyes — can result in better-than-20/20 vision.

Trials found it had a 100 per cent success rate in achieving 20/20 or ‘normal vision’, stopping the need for glasses.

But half achieved 20/12.5 vision, according to the findings published in the Journal of Cataract & Refractive Surgery. 

This means they can they can see at 20ft what a person with normal vision needs to be 12.5ft away to see.  

Some eight per cent scored 20/10 or ‘perfect vision’, generally only seen in one per cent of the population.  

Early results suggest it may also boost night vision — something never seen in laser eye surgery before. 

Ophthalmologist David Allamby, who carried out the procedure on six patients at London’s Focus Clinic yesterday, said it had the potential to ‘transform’ corrective eye surgery. 

One of the first patients to benefit is Rebecca Hackworth, who needed reading glasses to see text clearly.

The communications director, 50, was also short-sighted which made things in the distance blurry.

Mr Allamby said he expects the results will mean she can now see perfectly.

 He said: ‘I think it went really well. I treated her right eye only with ray-tracing-guided LASIK to give her what we call blended vision.

‘Her right eye will see very clearly for distance, and her left eye is left alone with mild myopia, which allows her to read without glasses. 

‘The result is clear distance and reading without any glasses.’

He added: ‘The technology has been nearly 20 years in development and is a major leap forward.

‘It means we can now perform the surgery virtually and treat your eye many times over inside the computer to refine and remove aberrations.

‘The new ray-tracing procedure understands these optical imperfections and is able to adjust the laser treatment pattern to correct them.

‘The implication is that this raises the bar on what we can achieve with laser eye surgery and will become the new standard for what patients expect from treatment.’

The technology is used as part of laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis (LASIK), the most common type of laser eye surgery in the UK.

This uses lasers to reshape the cornea to correct vision problems like short-sightedness and astigmatism, using a uniform prescription in the same way glasses do.

With this precision treatment, a new Sightmap scanner first creates an ‘eyevatar’ of a patient’s eye.

The digital twin then traces up to 2,000 rays of light to determine their path as they are refracted and focused by the cornea and lens inside the eye.

The laser eye treatment can then be customised so that all rays are focused properly onto the retina, achieving the best sight possible. 

Today, the UK became the first country in Europe to routinely offer the procedure, at the clinic which is popular with celebrities.

Mr Allamby added: ‘It is really exciting technology. If it works how it has in the studies, it really well make a huge difference to a lot of people.

‘I expect around three-quarters of patients to achieve 20/12, and around 20 per cent will achieve 20/10, binocularly.

‘That’s amazing, considering less than one per cent of humans can see this well.’