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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> "Then those little tiny pieces are vacuumed out of the eye," said Dr. Thomas Steinemann, an ophthalmologist at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland. "Within a few minutes, the cataract is gone. Once it is removed, it never returns."
After the natural lens has been removed, it often is replaced by an artificial lens, also called an intraocular lens. The lens requires no care and becomes a permanent part of the patient's eye.
Surgery also has been made easier by the creation of synthetic replacement lenses that can be folded, Steinemann said. These lenses, often made of acrylic or solid silicone, can be placed into the eye through a self-sealing incision as small as an eighth of an inch.
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"You can make your incision into the eye very tiny," he said. "It's less invasive, and makes recovery time much shorter." Because the incision is so tiny, sutures usually aren't needed.
Improvements in the lenses also have meant better vision for the people who receive them.
"We want to replace the lens with a lens that acts more and more like our own human lens," Schwartz said. "Lenses that will better and better allow people to see at different distances."
Older lens implants provided clear vision for people only at one specific distance.
But new so-called multifocal lens implants come closer to mimicking the sight provided by the human eye. Formed with concentric circles resembling a practice target, the lens allows a patient to shift his or her focus through slight eye movements.
Testing is under way on a further refinement involving a device called a wavefront analyzer. The device measures the way light travels through a cataract patient's entire optical pathway, then compares it to the way light travels through an optically perfect eye.
The information from this device can be used to create lenses crafted to address the specific irregularities of a person's visual system.
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