Shiny New Equipment!
Hey y’all, Dr. Goble here… I hope everyone is having a great 2020 so far!
It is crazy to say the year out loud or even to type it. I remember thinking about the year 2020 when I was in optometry school and how far away it seemed. Well, here we are in the year of excellent vision!
Predictably so, this year has been full of 20/20 vision puns already and I’m thinking (hoping) those will simmer down by March. I’m a sucker for a great pun but eyecare is so unintentionally full of them already there just isn’t room for many more this year.
I wanted to let you all know about an exciting piece of equipment we’ve added to the office since I talked to you last. It is called the Optos California! That beautiful machine you see there is a marvel of modern technology and I want to tell you all about it.
When patients come to me for a routine eye exam one of the things we do is look into the eye with a very bright light, a very powerful little lens, and a microscope. We use this tool to look into the eye through the pupil.
Anatomy / Physiology side bar: This may sound obvious to some but not to all I am sure… the pupil is a hole in the center of the iris. The pupil will get bigger and smaller depending on the amount of light in a given environment. Bright situations will result in a small pupil because the eyes and brain are trying to limit the amount of light entering the eye. Dim or dark situations will result in a large pupil as the eyes and brain are trying to allow as much light into the eye as possible.
As we shine this bright light into the pupil to see the tissue inside the eye, the pupil will get very small. This small window limits the angles in which we can look inside the eye and basically can only see straight back into the eye. This gives me about a 10% window of what is going on inside the eye. This view is certainly better than nothing but there is a lot we are missing out on viewing when this is the only perspective we have.
The “old school” way of getting a wider view of what is going internally with the eyes is called dilation. I call this old school because it used to be the only way to get a comprehensive view inside the eye. The dilation drops make your pupil very large and as a result patients become very light sensitive. The drops also fully relax the focusing system of the eyes so for most people they will not be able to focus on up close items with their contacts or glasses on. These side effects can last 4-5 hours and even longer for people with light colored eyes.
I do not know of a single person who likes to have their eyes dilated. It is not fun. Patients that visit our office mid-day a lot of times cannot be dilated as they need to return to their computers. Dilated eyes would make it very difficult to see their screen!
This is why we got our Optos California retinal scanner! The machine scans the inside of the eye with lasers that are so fast the scan happens before the pupil has a chance to react to the light. The machine gives us a super wide view of the inside of the eye all without the needs for dilation drops and the subsequent annoyances. We can use this machine on any patient who can fixate on a target for 5-10 seconds. So this is a great tool for our youngest patients as well!
This machine is so cool even for someone who isn’t a super eye nerd like me. If you decide to have the scan done as a patient, we go over the image in great detail to explain what it is showing us and what is also is not showing us. I have never had a patient say they wish they had not done the scan afterwards. It is so cool!
The list of things we are looking for inside the eye is too long to cover here but ensuring the eyes are healthy with regular scans can make sure we get out ahead of any issues. In some cases dilation may still be required but that does not happen very often.
I will talk to every patient about this machine and the information it is able to give us but if you have any questions about it before you get to your appointment, give me a shout at drgoble@eyesinthepark.com !
See ya soon!
Grant