Laser eye surgery – pioneering advances

The London Vision Clinic’s founder and Medical Director, Professor Dan Reinstein, is one of the medical experts who have significantly refined and advanced the technology and techniques of laser eye surgery.

The first breakthrough in laser eye surgery

It was while at Cornell that Professor Dan Reinstein made his first major breakthrough, when he found that ultrasound could be used to scan the surface of the cornea with extraordinary accuracy. Using a frequency 30x that used for foetal ultrasound, he mapped individual layers of corneal tissue, at an accuracy of one micron – 1/1000mm.

Convinced that this was a very significant discovery, the young Professor Dan Reinstein was determined to make it his career. His confidence was rewarded when Stephen Trokel, the co-inventor of the Excimer laser, recognised the value of this new scanning technique. Trokel sent Dan human subjects for scanning: people who had developed complications from eye laser treatment in its earliest days.

The prototype scanner, built with his father-in-law’s camera tripod, was to become the world’s most accurate corneal scanner, the Artemis Insight 100™. Even today, only a handful of eye institutes have access to an Artemis Insight 100™ scanner. One of them is the London Vision Clinic.