David Lin, MD, shares his experiences with SCHWIND SmartSurfACE eye laser treatment (TransPRK)

Dr David Lin, Medical Director at the Pacific Laser Eye Centre in Vancouver, Canada, shares his experiences with SCHWIND SmartSurfACE treatment.
The interview was recorded at the ESCRS 2017 in Lisbon.
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If you prefer reading, here’s the transcript of the spoken interview:
Hi, my name is Dr David Lin and I'd like to share my experiences with SmartSurfACE with you. We have been performing SmartSurfACE since June of 2014 and today we've treated over 4,500 cases and we're now averaging over 3,000 eyes a year - and it is completely transformed how we perform laser surgery in Vancouver. As a background: we treat over 90,000 cases at Pacific Laser Center and we first started doing PRK in 1990 but it was quite slow in recovery because at that time we scraped the cornea or used alcohol which caused pain and slowed visual recovery. We switched to LASIK in 1994 and FemtoLasik in 2005 but we have issues of flaps which we do not see at PRK. So in 2007, we started two-step transepithelial PRK with a different laser and that is, we use the PTK at first, followed by a PRK. The results are ok but the procedure took quite long, in that it takes quite a few seconds to transmit the surgeries between the PTK and the PRK and this resulted in variable drying. In 2014, the engineers at SCHWIND and I worked together to improve a smoother spot algorithm and the results were an immediate improvement in the visual recovery of patients, such that 93 percent of all our patients, immediately after surgery, achieved 20/40 or better. And this is completely functional vision. That is, they can look at their cell phones, they can send and receive texts, which resulted in an immediate word-of-mouth marketing. Now the results are even better for very tiny myopes: -0.5 myopes to -1.25 diopters of nearsightedness. And this is a range which was very difficult to treat before, with other modalities, because of this small refraction. In this group, 97% of our patients achieved 20/40 or better and immediately after surgery and after 2 weeks 95% were at 20/20 or better. SmartSurfACE is also excellent for treating keratoconus, combined with crosslinking. For very severe keratoconus, greater than 55 diopters, we found that over 98% had improvement of best-corrected visions - better than 20/40 which is the goal in these cases. For moderate keratoconus, 46 to 55 diopters, we're achieving 98% 20/40 or better best corrected - but, more importantly, uncorrected visions in 82% of 20/40 or better. This is a very functional vision. So, in summary, SmartSurfACE has changed how visual recovery has occurred in our patients, such that there's an immediate "wow" effect. Patients love it because it takes only 45 seconds. There's no stress for the surgeon, there's no stress for the patient, it's very low pain and there's immediate visual recovery so they can function right away. It's been a complete paradigm shift in our practice, such that we're pretty much doing all our cases with SmartSurfACE.