Eye charts can show a doctor how well you see, but they won't describe the 3-D curvature in your eye's cornea that dictates why you see the way you do. Knowing the eye's exact curvature is critical to correct fitting of contact lenses, proper diagnosis of eye disease, and eye surgery, but measuring that directly on a sensitive, living eye is tricky. One technique ophthalmic surgeons use is to project concentric rings of light onto the eye and observe the spacing and shapes of those rings.
Computed Anatomy's TMS-1 Topographic Modeling System takes the concentric-ring idea into the computer age. Instead of capturing the reflected rings on film, the TMS-1 does it on video, then processes each image in a PC to produce an array of digital maps. The dazzling colors throw curvatures into sharp relief, like the color coding on geographers' topographical maps. The head-on relief maps can be tilted into a perspective view, or the lines of curvature unrolled to show their deviations (a sphere would show up as a straight line). Scales can be superimposed over the maps, to let the surgeon read the curvature directly at each point on the eye. The resulting images are of startling beauty - A common byproduct of today's advanced medical imaging technology. You're not likely to observe this beauty at home, though: The TMS-1 sells for about the price of a small to medium Mercedes.
- Ivan Berger
TMS-1: US$20,000-28,000, depending on options. Computed Anatomy Inc: +1 (212) 947 7424, fax +1 (212) 629 5186.
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