Lasik eyesight-correction surgery, a phenomenal breakthrough when it was first approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 1995, has recently been trumped big-time by the innovation known as wavefront Lasik technology, which is some 25 times more precise than its older cousin.

The consumer still has both choices available today - the traditional versus the new custom technique - but there is an enormous difference in technology.

In the traditional version of Lasik, the doctor begins with a device well known to almost everyone from the optometrist's office. It's a phoropter - a floor-standing apparatus with a thicket of lenses through which the patient looks at a traditional eye chart, with lines of progressively smaller letters. The phoropter gives the surgeon offering traditional Lasik a clear picture of how the patient's corneas need to be altered to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism. But, far from providing the doctor with an individual "fingerprint" of the eye, it produces only a prescription that is probably exactly the same as those of hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people.

With custom Lasik, however, the surgeon shines a light into the patient's eye, and it bounces back into the wavefront machine showing a precise, individual "fingerprint" of all the imperfections of the cornea. The system's computer then produces a three-dimensional image of the patient's eye for the surgeon to use.

While traditional Lasik corrects only for the three conditions mentioned above, custom Lasik does this and more. It also takes care of minute corneal defects known as higher-order aberrations. These include things like glare in low-light circumstances, halos around lights, starburst (light radiating out from its source) and ghosting (faint images that create double vision).

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