Topography-Guided Corneal Refractive Surgery Receives FDA Approval

Post date: Dec 02, 2013 10:50:10 PM

Yes! Topography-guided laser vision correction has finally been approved in the USA! Just like with corneal cross-linking, topography-guided custom ablation treatment (T-CAT) has been approved everywhere else in the world for a while yet. But, it's finally here ... almost.

The FDA granted the approval for the Allegretto Wave Eye-Q (the 400 series) in conjunction with its Topolyzer to analyze the corneal surface. While I haven't personally seen this Topolyzer or used it before, I'd imagine it's like how we use the Wavescan to capture wavefront information and plug that into the VISX to create a wavefront treatment. So, the catch is that we upgraded to the Allegretto EX500 this summer! I asked Dr. Holzman about this, and he feels that the approval for the EX500 will come soon after this most-recent approval. If this is true, I just have to keep my fingers crossed that the Allegretto 500 gets approval soon and that we can get the Topolyzer int our office, too!

I think that the majority of patients do not specifically need topo-guided treatments. Usually cases where Dr. Holzman felt like a topo-guided treatment was best often involved enhancement of a patient that, say, had a slightly decentered ablation. Perhaps a denser scar that affected topography. For a great background article on topo-guided treatments, I learned a lot from this article in Review of Ophthalmology. - jw