LASIK eye surgery has been performed successfully since the late 90s, and it has helped many millions of people to improve their vision. About 600,000 of these surgeries are carried out each year in the US, and thousands more in other countries. This has been a great success story in vision health, and a new process may make it even better. LASIK is a procedure that reshapes the cornea of your eye by using lasers to cut into it. The cornea is a dome-shaped, clear structure at the front of our eyes that helps us to process images. Irregularly shaped corneas are the cause of most common vision problems: nearsighted, farsighted and astigmatism. LASIK fixes these by burning away part of the cornea to reshape it. LASIK surgery has been safely performed for 30 years with rare complications, but it does have some limitations and risks. This new process is called electromechanical reshaping, and it changes the shape of the cornea more gently. The research is in its early stages, but this could eventually offer an alternative to LASIK, that does not use invasive incisions, and is less expensive. 

This new procedure has yet to be performed on humans, but it has been successfully tested on laboratory animals with eyes that are very similar to human eyes. The process starts by constructing something that looks like a contact lens. It is in the shape that they want the corrected cornea to become, and it serves as a template or model for how the healed cornea will look. This lens is placed over the eyeball, and then a very small electric charge is sent to the lens. The curvature of the cornea immediately conforms to the shape of the lens, thus correcting it for perfect vision. This happens in the same amount of time as a LASIK treatment, but with no incisions and less expensive equipment. “This new effect was discovered by accident,” says Brian Wong, a professor and surgeon at the University of California. “I was looking at living tissues as mouldable materials, and discovered this whole process of modification.” LASIK has been a godsend to millions, and this new process could make that kind of healing available to even more people.