Waring Medal Awarded To Avi Wallerstein at Virtual OSN New York

NEW YORK — The 2020 Waring Medal was awarded to Avi Wallerstein, MD, FRCSC (pictured above, right, with Mathieu Gauvin, BEng, PhD), for his study on excimer higher-order aberration ablation depth and its impact on LASIK outcomes.

Since the inception of topography-guided LASIK in healthy primary eyes, surgeons have been debating if eyes with larger amounts of naturally-occurring anterior corneal higher-order aberrations would result in outliers or inferior postoperative outcomes if treated using the manifest refraction.

Wallerstein and colleagues’ study “Effect of Anterior Corneal Higher-Order Aberration Ablation Depth on Primary Topography-Guided LASIK Outcomes” employed large data analytics to gain clinical insights and helped resolve this common controversy in primary topography-guided LASIK.

In the 9,722 Contoura eyes, the amount of preoperative anterior corneal HOAs was found to have a negligible impact on outcomes, with excellent efficacy, accuracy, and safety in both low and high anterior corneal HOAs groups. No clinically-meaningful correlation was found between the preoperative anterior corneal HOAs and the amount of postoperative sphere, refractive astigmatism, and SEQ, all with quasi-null correlation coefficients. This study further confirms that the degree of preoperative anterior corneal HOAs in primary eyes does not meaningfully influence the preoperative refractive astigmatism to be treated.

Healthy virgin eyes with larger amounts of anterior corneal HOAs should therefore not be excluded from topography-guided surgery and can be safely treated on the manifest refraction.

More information can be found on Dr. Wallerstein’s Refractive Surgery Research Unit: www.refractivesurgery.ca.

Ref: Wallerstein A, Gauvin M, Cohen M. The Effect of Anterior Corneal Higher-Order Aberration Ablation Depth on Primary Topography-Guided LASIK Outcomes. J. Refract Surg. 2019;35(12):754-762