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Through a slit lamp the doctor can examine ocular tissue at the front of the eye including the cornea, iris and lens.
In laser eye surgery, a slit lamp is used at several stages. It will be used during a pre-operative evaluation to ensure the eye is in good overall health and to rule out certain types of contraindications. After surgery it will be used to examine the flap and ensure everything is healing well.
While the slit-lamp will detect many complications of laser eye surgery (flap complications, haze, etc), in many cases it cannot detect the causes of optical aberrations and symptoms like starbursts, haloes and poor contrast. This sometimes causes a communication breakdown between doctors and patients in cases where the patient's primary problem is vision quality defects caused by optical aberrations. The doctor may give the all clear based upon a slit-lamp examination, but wavefront aberrometry and/or corneal topography may still reveal problems that explain the patient's symptoms. |
