Rochester Nomogram Patent

U.S. Patent 8,273,077 Makes Custom LASIK Better than Ever!

A U.S. patent was issued to the University of Rochester for technology that has boosted the eyesight of tens of thousands of people around the world to unprecedented levels and reduced the need for patients to undergo repeat surgeries.

Dr. MacRae and Manoj Venkiteshwar, Ph.D., invented the Rochester Nomogram, a complex formula that helps physicians determine how refractive surgery, such as LASIK, will affect a person’s eyesight. The Nomogram adjusts the way a laser interacts with a person’s eye tissue, vastly reducing the chances that the patient’s eyes will be near-sighted or far-sighted after the procedure.

Thanks to the Nomogram, the Flaum Eye Institute advanced laser vision correction team was able to slash by two thirds the number of patients who needed additional procedures to achieve the best vision possible. Peer reviewed data reported a remarkable 99.3 percent of our custom LASIK patients who were treated with the technology saw 20/20 or better after surgery.

Eyesight is crucial to everyone’s quality of life. As a physician, I am required to do everything in my power to make sure each of my patients has the very best vision possible. There’s nothing like the feeling of having a patient sit up after surgery, look at the clock on the wall, and exclaim that it’s the first time in decades they’ve been able to tell the time without wearing glasses. -- Scott MacRae

The technology was licensed to Technolas Perfect Vision, a cataract and refractive laser company that is a product of a joint venture between Bausch + Lomb and 20/10 Perfect Vision AG. As a result, tens of thousands of people around the world have had vision procedures in which the Nomogram has played a role.

The patent is one of numerous highlights in a 20-year effort by University scientists and physicians to study and improve human vision. In the early 1990s, scientist David Williams, Ph.D., director of the Center for Visual Science, began a series of experiments to look into the eye in unprecedented detail, not only to see the organ’s fine structures but also to understand how light moves around inside the eye.

His pioneering work opened the door, for the first time in history, to the possibility of fixing not only the three major flaws in the eye that prescription glasses and contact lenses have corrected for decades, but also approximately 60 additional imperfections that were never known before. Nearly everyone has these flaws in their eyes to some extent; while most people don’t notice them, they hurt our quality of vision in subtle ways.

MacRae, an internationally recognized refractive surgeon, moved to Rochester in 2000 from Portland, Ore., to help bring the developments to the bedsides of patients and give them a quality of eyesight that was not possible before Williams’ work. Through a series of clinical trials and work in the laboratory, the Rochester team did just that.

The team helped to create a field known as customized ablation, a form of LASIK that corrects subtle imperfections, bringing about a super-crisp quality of eyesight. Beyond making vision on the order of 20/15 or 20/16 possible or even commonplace in some groups of patients, the technology also increases the eye’s ability to see in situations where there is low light or little contrast.

Currently, teams of researchers at Flaum Eye Institute are working on the next generation of Laser Vision Correction.