Laser astronomy aiding in eye examinations

[Dr_Evil]

I figured this would be a good place to put this since I don't see the news section anymore.

A laser that helps astronomers examine new planets has been adapted to help doctors examine cells in the eye. The breakthrough is enabled by new miniature mirrors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.


Lasers have been used for surgery and 2D imaging for years, but a new animation is the first 3D view inside a living eye clear enough to see individual cells -- thanks to laser astronomy.

During an eye exam, your doctor flips a series of lenses between you and the wall chart. A device called a MEMS does the same thing for the largest telescopes in the world.

Source: Lawrence Livermore Lab's laser astronomy technology is aiding in eye examinations | abc7news.com

This sounds like some great technology. I'm still waiting on a way to fix "lazy eye" problems though. It would be nice to have 20/20 in both eyes rather than 20/20 and 20/200+ even after corrective optics.

 

[Benm]

I wonder what the practial application will be though.

Mapping the entire optical path in the eye could perhaps be useful for doing even better corrective laser surgery, or even custom-created contact lenses.

If it were to improve laser correction that would be a great improvement - instead of getting vision closer to normal, you could end up with vision better than normal. That could make the whole eye correction industry much better...

Persoanlly, i'm somewhat nearsighted (-1.25), which makes current laser surgery not all that attractive. If it could be modifed to distortion-free 0.00 correction, i'd readily pay for that.