Myopia is a disease of the eye in which the patient is able to see the close things clearly due to perfect focus but are unable to see the distant ones clearly. The study was conducted to study corneal remodeling in 6 months after myopic small incision lenticule extraction (SMILE) with a 10% overcorrection nomogram, by spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) and in vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM).
Examination of 60 eyes from 30 patients treated by SMILE for low to moderate myopia was done for the purpose of study. A 10% overcorrection nomogram was applied for all eyes.
The mean surgical refractive correction was −3.99 ± 1.50 diopters (D) before and −0.09 ± 0.37 D after surgery. Central epithelial thickness increased from 53.7 ± 4.0 to 57.1 ± 4.1 µm at 6 months after SMILE (P < .001). The measured lenticule thickness was 16 ± 6.1 µm less than the programmed lenticule thickness (P < .001). Both central epithelial hyperplasia and the mismatch between measured and programmed lenticule thickness were positively correlated to the degree of myopia (r2 = 0.60, P < .001 and r2 = 0.47, P < .001, respectively). Fibrosis at the interface was not correlated with epithelial thickening (r2 = 0.06, P = .29) or lenticule thickness error (r2 = 0.07, P = .22).
Slight undercorrection with a 10% resulted from both epithelial thickening and the mismatch between the targeted and achieved lenticule thickness.
Reference: https://doi.org/10.3928/1081597X-20200713-01
