Corneal wound healing relevance to wavefront guided laser treatments

Abstract

Corneal wound healing makes important contributions to the outcomes of both traditional excimer laser ablation procedures and custom corneal ablations and contributes to the poor predictability of keratorefractive surgery in some patients. In addition, wound healing makes important contributions to some complications of PRK, LASEK or LASIK,including haze and diffuse lamellar keratitis. Detailed characterization of the wound healing cascade that occurs following refractive procedures is fundamental to pharmacological and molecular approaches for controlling or normalizing the response to surgery,thereby reducing biological diversity in variables such as epithelial hyperplasia and stromal remodeling that often tend to mask attempts at custom ablation.