Eyeworld

93 EW SECONDARY FEATURE March 2016 Contact information Dell: steven@dellmd.com Kanellopoulos: ajkmd@mac.com with what is now archaic tech- nology suffered from night vision complaints and other issues," he said. "The supreme irony is that today, with the best results ever achieved with LASIK, the market is depressed." However, he said it's hard to know if a newly branded procedure change would matter sig- nificantly. "Because the laser vision correction market in the aggregate only accounts for a single digit share of the overall vision correction market, a small change in the per- centage of people willing to consider laser vision correction would have a profound impact on the industry," he said. Dr. Kanellopoulos thinks that SMILE will initially be pulling from the traditional pool of LASIK candi- dates. These would be myopic LASIK candidates, as it is not yet available for hyperopia within the European Union. He said we will have to wait and see if the data, efficacy, and safety will prove it to be a better procedure in the future. "Of course, it is unfair to com- pare SMILE to LASIK currently, as SMILE is in its infancy in clinical application and technology design, whereas LASIK has gone through a multitude of generations of excimer lasers, keratomes, mechanical initial femtosecond lasers, and millions of eyes treated," Dr. Kanellopoulos said. Dr. Kanellopoulos thinks that a "SMILE-like procedure" will even- tually replace LASIK, "purely based on the fact that SMILE is the least invasive procedure for the corneal surface." SMILE may have an advan- tage over LASIK in biomechanics and may have an advantage over both LASIK and PRK as far as the disturbance to the corneal surface, epithelial remodeling, cornea nerve damage, and regeneration, he said. Dr. Kanellopoulos and his team are currently investigating, on a clini- cal level, the epithelial remodeling properties of SMILE vs. LASIK vs. PRK, the centration achieved with SMILE compared to LASIK, the amount of tissue removed, and its correlation to the whole ablation zone involved, and cornea biome- chanics evaluation ex-vivo of LASIK vs. SMILE. EW Editors' note: Dr. Dell has financial interests with Abbott Medical Optics (Abbott Park, Ill.), Bausch + Lomb (Bridgewater, N.J.), and Optical Express (Glasgow, Scotland). Dr. Kanellopoulos has financial interests with Alcon (Fort Worth, Texas), ARC Laser (Nuremberg, Germany), Avedro (Waltham, Mass.), KeraMed (Orange, Calif.), Optovue (Fremont, Calif.), and Carl Zeiss Meditec.

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