Intraocular lens

Summary

An Intraocular lens (IOL) is a lens implanted in the eye usually as part of a treatment for cataracts or for correcting other vision problems such as short sightedness and long sightedness, a form of refractive surgery. If the natural lens is left in the eye, the IOL is known as phakic, otherwise it is a pseudophakic lens (or false lens). Both kinds of IOLs are designed to provide the same light-focusing function as the natural crystalline lens. This can be an alternative to LASIK, but LASIK is not an alternative to an IOL for treatment of cataracts. IOLs usually consist of a small plastic lens with plastic side struts, called haptics, to hold the lens in place in the capsular bag inside the eye. IOLs were originally made of a rigid material (PMMA), although this has largely been superseded by the use of flexible materials, such as silicone. Most IOLs fitted today are fixed monofocal lenses matched to distance vision. However, other types are available, such as a multifocal intraocular lens that provides multiple-focused vision at far and reading distance, and adaptive IOLs that provide limited visual accommodation. Multifocal IOLs can also be Trifocal IOLs or extended depth of focus (EDOF) lenses. As of 2021, nearly 28 million cataract procedures take place annually worldwide, a large proportion in India. That is about 75,000 procedures per day globally. The procedure can be done under local or topical anesthesia with the patient awake throughout the operation. The use of a flexible IOL enables the lens to be rolled for insertion into the capsular bag through a very small incision, thus avoiding the need for stitches. This procedure usually takes less than 30 minutes in the hands of an experienced ophthalmologist, and the recovery period is about 2–3 weeks. After surgery, patients should avoid strenuous exercise or anything else that significantly increases blood pressure. They should visit their ophthalmologists regularly for 3 weeks to monitor the implants.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraocular_lens

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (2)

Related concepts (26)

Related courses (22)

Related lectures (163)

Related MOOCs (2)

Adaptive optics is used to abate aberrations with a wavefront correction. It is widely used in astronomy and is starting to expand into applications of laser focusing and imaging with high numerical apertures, e.g. microscopy. The physical background of focusing laser light and imaging is the same, so we can use the same methods. In both cases, light is propagating through a lens; either it becomes focused into a small region or light from a small region becomes imaged on a camera. Modulations applied on the lens to implement wavefront corrections behave similarly in both applications. A powerful simulation tool was created to characterize the impact of those modulations. As an example, we validated a design for a Fresnel lens produced on a glass fibre tip to focus its emitting light. We have developed solutions mainly for three different problems. First, a high depth of focus enables keeping a laser beam focused within a larger length or imaging objects from different positions simultaneously. In photography, this can be attained by stopping down the aperture, which introduces a huge loss of light. State-of-the-art for focusing into a line segment also shows an inefficient performance. We present an elegant lens design, which enables highly efficient elongation of the depth of focus. Preliminary studies have shown that it might be a feasible alternative for current intra-ocular lens implants in ophthalmology or for 3D visualization in imaging and microscopy. A high depth of focus also has a large potential in optical lithography and data storage, because the focal position is enlarged and does not have to be adjusted precisely to obtain a useful spot. Second, specimen-induced aberrations can affect even a perfectly adjusted, diffraction limited lens system. A planar refraction index mismatch introduces spherical aberrations, degrading the optical resolution. As a first step to correct them, we were able to characterize simultaneously the refractive index and the thickness of an unknown medium that is placed between the lens and its focal region. This was done by clever manipulation of the beam angles with the same adaptive optics element in the focusing and in the imaging system. Finally, the medium-induced spherical aberrations were corrected based on the characterization results. The point spread function degradation of a focused laser beam was completely removed, which might be useful in optical tweezers or in laser processing of biological samples. While imaging through the planar refractive index mismatch, the bending of the object field was corrected and the diffraction limited performance restored.

EPFL2012

Cataract is the leading cause of blindness worldwide. The clouding of the human eye lens is called "Grauer Star" in German. In the industrialized countries this process of increased blindness is corrected by the surgical removal of the clouded lens and its replacement by a plastic lens (intraocular lens, IOL). Cataract surgery is the most frequent surgery worldwide. In Europe more than two million operations are performed annually. For the selection of an optimum replacement the refractive power of the lens is calculated from the radius of curvature of the cornea, the length of the eye and the anterior chamber depth. Therefore these data have to be measured before every surgery. Until now the length of the eye was measured exclusively by ultrasound in the clinical praxis. For this procedure the sound transducer has to be placed directly or via a water funnel onto the cornea. It was the aim of the work presented in this thesis to lay the framework for introducing into the clinical praxis a contact free optical length measurement of the eye. The basic parameters for the measurement were determined. Starting from the state of the art new solutions were found, implemented in a laboratory device, and tested clinically. A two-beam interferometer with light of short coherence length that had been developed at the University Vienna was analyzed and compared with the one-beam technique. Neglecting practical limitations due to the optical arrangement and assuming shot-noise limited detection the one-beam technique allows the measurement of reflected light that is a factor of two lower compared to the two-beam technique. From the point of view of detection both techniques are therefore equivalent. The advantage of the two-beam technique is its independence from the eye movement. Until now the two-beam technique utilizes for detection only 1 over 400 of the light reflected from the retina and 1 over 2500 to 1 over 4000 of the light reflected from the cornea. This causes the dynamic range to drop by 26 dB. Furthermore the noise of the electronics (excess noise) comes into play. In this work a novel concept for the optical configuration in the two-beam interferometer is presented. By using a diffractive lens cornea and retina are imaged simultaneously onto the detector and the losses of the light from the retina are minimized. The cornea is imaged with an efficiency of 5.6 per cent. In order to minimize the requirements on the patient the measuring time was shortened to 1 s. Therefore the scan speed was increased by a factor of four compared to the state of the art. In the laboratory device it fluctuated by 20 per cent. To keep the detection narrow band it was necessary to implement a signal processing that is largely independent of the scan speed. By using a synchronous demodulation of two 90 degrees phase-shifted channels that are added as vector quantities a filter with self-adjusting center frequency was created. Its bandwidth is 4 kHz with signal frequencies between 30 kHz and 90 kHz. This concept was realized as a compact slit-lamp head and tested clinically. A shot-noise limited detection with a dynamic range of 105 dB was achieved (input power 200 µW). On the healthy eye the signal-to-noise ratio was limited by the digitization range of 8 bit. On the eye with cataract the measuring was not limited by the degree of clouding any more. The optical lengths were determined along the line of sight. They agreed with the post operative results. In some cases refractive errors of more than 2 dpt would have been avoidable by determining the IOL from the measurement of the optical length of the eye. This technique allows a comfortable, contact free optical eye length measurement that works correctly in 95 per cent of all eyes with cataract. Additionally smaller post operative refractive errors can be achieved as compared with traditional techniques. These results were the basis for the development of the IOL-Master – a novel device for the cataract treatment – at the Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH. With this device all biometric data can be measured in a non-contact fashion and intraocular lenses can be calculated and selected.

EPFL2001

EPFL2012

EPFL2001