Monday, March 17, 2003

  Map It!

I went to the optometrist last weekend and realized how long it's been since my last visit. They had all these tecnologically advanced new-fangled devices that make the optometrist's job a lot simpler, but surely require tens of thousands of dollars.

The two machines impressed me most:

The Prescrition-Reading Thingy
This machine/computer "read" my prescription when I looked through its eyepiece. It was kind of surreal--I took my glasses off (you must keep in mind my eyes are very bad--everything is a blur to me), looked into a lens at a big grey blur, and within a few seconds the machine whirred and clicked a few times and the blur became a block of clear letters and numbers.Apparently a laser shot threough my pupil onto my retina and back out through my pupil again and a computer ibnside calculated the extent of my nearsightedness.

The Corneal Topographer
Now this was the coolest-- after sitting through the usual rounds of "which is clearer, number one or number two? Now which is clearer, one. . or two?" I had to look into this large plastic gun-shaped device the doctor held by hand. In the peek-hole, as I call it, there was a single orange light in the middle of several concentric yellow rings of light. I had to sit still as the yellow circles reflected off the surface of my cornea, creating a 3-D map that was read by the orange beam in the center. The doctor then plugged the device in to the computer he had in his office, and bang--there was a topographic map of my cornea. Pretty cool stuff. This thing not only saved the doctor the trouble of having to drag a sliver of light across my eye and write down dozens of measurements by hand, but it also created a more accurate map of my cornea, thus providing me with a more comfortable contact lens. My estimate on the cost of the device and it software--tens of thousands.

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