Artificial intelligence (AI) in the service of refractive surgery
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not some unusual variety of intelligence that extraterrestrial beings are endowed with, but a feature of devices that we are able to equip them with, given sufficiently advanced programming skills and knowledge of how Big Data (very large data sets) works.
Therefore, “smart” can be a car, a vacuum cleaner or even an entire house. We can also say about very complex ophthalmic diagnostic devices and high-tech ophthalmic lasers that they are “intelligent” – j if only they are skillfully programmed. Stripping artificial intelligence of all the unnecessary mystery, we can define it as simply as possible: AI is an algorithm that takes and processes data, and makes decisions based on it.
How does artificial intelligence assist the doctor?
Thanks to the fact that AI is able to process a great deal of data in a short period of time, including highly complex data or data that might escape human attention (or even: be imperceptible to humans) and which would take a lot of time to analyze, it is possible to design “tailor-made” eye surgeries.
AI does not replace the doctor, which is what patients fear the most, but helps him at every stage of the decision-making process: from diagnosis, to the choice of surgical method, to every movement made during the procedure. It’s not that the human doctor has no say, because he is replaced by a robot (your imagination now probably suggests to you a humanoid creature that has a functioning hand, but no heart…). On the contrary: the human doctor has a great deal of say in the architecture of your particular procedure laser vision correction, because devices equipped with artificial intelligence allow him to collect the maximum amount of data, making the procedure as safe as possible.
Where the doctor can’t, there the artificial intelligence will send
Ophthalmic diagnostics, especially those involving preparing a patient for either laser vision correction or implantation of an artificial lens, require analysis of test results presented graphically, often as three-dimensional models of eye structures.
Even a very experienced and constantly retraining doctor is not able to grasp all the information that is “encrypted”, for example, in the image of the cornea (it is the cornea that is directly affected by laser intervention during short- or farsightedness surgery).
Artificial intelligence helps:
- quickly and without confusion gather information about a particular patient’s eye,
- accurately decide whether and by what method it can be operated on,
- determine how the patient will see after surgery (which is extremely important, for example, when choosing artificial implantable lenses, when the patient has a whole suit of PREMIUM lenses to choose from and can decide on the quality of vision for distance, nearsightedness and intermediate distances).
Why does laser vision correction/implantation of artificial lenses take at most twenty minutes?
Because AI in ophthalmology is a guarantee of fast and accurate diagnosis and maximum reduction in the duration of surgical procedures. If it were not for AI support at every stage of the diagnostic process and during ophthalmic surgery, the doctor would have to constantly verify data. The need for real-time decision-making would draw the surgery into infinity!
Equally important, artificial intelligence allows the doctor to decide whether to admit those patients who – diagnosed “on foot” – due to more complicated, irregular, deviating from standard structure of individual eye structures, could not be qualified for laser vision correction or implantation of artificial lenses.
Even the most experienced refractive surgeon with only his own eyes at his disposal is less precise than when supported by AI. Why? Algorithms that analyze data are not subject to the risk of error due to physical or emotional fatigue – which is easily imagined in a human being whose senses are overloaded beyond measure – and are able to repeatedly verify the data to ultimately present reliable results.
