In what could be termed as nothing less than a miracle, a legally – blind woman has achieved perfect vision after an AI-assisted eye surgery in the United Kingdom.

Patrícia Gonçalves, 31 from Portugal has been wearing eyeglasses since the age of 5. Without them she suffered from extreme short-sightedness and astigmatism, an eye-condition which causes distorted or blurry vision. She underwent Lasik surgery in London this week. The story was reported by the Telegraph through a paywalled article.

How AI was used in the eye-surgery ?

The scans were done of the patient in order to achieve a digital replica of the eyeballs. The AI program then experimented on the digital replica and created a customized plan that would treat the particular patient. Once the program created that specific method, the surgery then implemented the same on the real eyes. The patient achieved 20/16 vision which is better than the standard eye-sight benchmark of 20/20 meaning seeing things clearly from a distance of 20 feet.

The surgery was performed by Mr David Allamby at Focus Clinics and the procedure costed £6,500. For this particular patient, it was important to minimize the point spread function (PSF) which affects the distortion of the object when its image fall on the retina.

The AI Technology for Laser vision correction

“Eyevatar” is the laser vision correction technology that was used in this particular case. The technology makes a digital model of the real eye balls which serves as the blue print for the surgeons to do mock surgery on them. This is particularly useful so that the surgeon can understand the underlying unique structure of patient’s eye in detail. The technology may reduce the potential of human-error during the treatment allowing for better results and quicker recovery.