Know How Corneal Topography Technology Helps in Seeing Your Cornea

Today’s technology is just great and you can have a map of your cornea in no time. The technology involved is known as "corneal topography" and the computer-generated printout can assist the doctor to figure out your corneal condition with real-time statistics.

With the aid of the colored printouts, your surgeon can find out any of the impending corneal abnormalities and evaluate your vision accurately.

Your cornea is a bubble like object and any of the abnormalities, be it in the shape of eruptions or pits, can be identified with the corneal topography created printout and your surgeon can take corrective measures.

Based on the data available and the interpretations made, your doctor will decide whether or not you should undergo LASIK procedure.

In case you are identified for LASIK and you have made up your mind to undergo the LASIK, then the surgeon can use the same corneal topography technique to show you the “before and after” pictures and show you the surgically corrected corneal areas and explain what has really happened and how you got your improved vision once again.

The maps also depict the values of your refractive power of your cornea, both pre and post operative stages, and you yourself can assess the changes that has been made on your cornea by the doctors.

The maps obtained from corneal topography technology is capable of revealing even many of the rare complications and any person who have undergone a procedure for correcting nearsightedness problem can actually see how his cornea got flattened that help in setting right the problem.

Very high-resolution video cameras are used while mapping your cornea in corneal topography technique and these cameras are computer controlled for precision and clarity while mapping your corneal area.

During the mapping process, for each and every half-diopter change in topography or elevation, a different color or shade will be used with the aid of a different light-focusing power.

The eruptions or the so called “hills” will be colored in warm shades of reds, oranges, and yellows while the pits or the so called flatter "valleys" will be colored in cool shades of light and dark blue.

Green color will be used to represent the middle area. Hence the final map will have its higher elevations with high refractive power colored in bright red and the pits or areas with lesser dioptric power colored in dark blue.

Once the chart or the map is over, you will have your cornea represented in a graphical manner and all the refractive power ranges and the corneal irregularities can actually be seen in the map.

Your doctor can make use of the corneal topography to understand better about your astigmatism.

You may be aware that refractive error is primarily caused by the change in the curvature of your cornea and the corneal topographic maps can help your doctor to rule out the possibility of subclinical keratoconus.

A yet another debilitating eye disease where a thinning and a cone-shaped steepening of cornea results in irregular astigmatism. Further, your doctor can also make us of the corneal topographic map for diagnosing very subtle conditions that are otherwise difficult to find out with other types of tests.

Your eye doctor will make an assessment about the level of astigmatism as per the corneal topographic map and compare it with the total refractive astigmatism that your glasses can correct.

Though these assessments never coincide, there are some astigmatism caused primarily by internal eye irregularities and hence the corneal topography can assist your doctor in deciding as to how much of your corneal based astigmatism could be corrected using LASIK procedure.

The corneal map also assist your doctor whether or not you are fit for wearing contact lenses and the doctor can also decide on the best contact lenses for you.

A computer generated image can greatly assist you in real situation to try on various types of contact lenses such as soft, or soft toric (this is specifically recommended for astigmatism), or rigid gas permeable lenses and you will be able to decide on the perfect set of lenses without even wearing them on your eyes

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