Ophthalmology is a surgical subspecialty within medicine that deals with the diagnosis and treatment of eye disorders. A former term is oculism.
Near-sightedness, also known as myopia and short-sightedness, is an eye disease where light from distant objects focuses in front of, instead of on, the retina. As a result, distant objects appear blurry while close objects appear normal. Other symptoms may include headaches and eye strain. Severe near-sightedness is associated with an increased risk of macular degeneration, retinal detachment, cataracts, and glaucoma.
A cataract is a cloudy area in the lens of the eye that leads to a decrease in vision of the eye. Cataracts often develop slowly and can affect one or both eyes. Symptoms may include faded colours, blurry or double vision, halos around light, trouble with bright lights, and difficulty seeing at night. This may result in trouble driving, reading, or recognizing faces. Poor vision caused by cataracts may also result in an increased risk of falling and depression. Cataracts cause 51% of all cases of blindness and 33% of visual impairment worldwide.
LASIK or Lasik, commonly referred to as laser eye surgery or laser vision correction, is a type of refractive surgery for the correction of myopia, hyperopia, and an actual cure for astigmatism, since it is in the cornea. LASIK surgery is performed by an ophthalmologist who uses a laser or microkeratome to reshape the eye's cornea in order to improve visual acuity.
Radial keratotomy (RK) is a refractive surgical procedure to correct myopia (nearsightedness). It was developed in 1974 by Svyatoslav Fyodorov, a Russian ophthalmologist. It has been largely supplanted by newer, more accurate operations, such as photorefractive keratectomy, LASIK, Epi-LASIK and the phakic intraocular lens.
Refractive surgery is optional eye surgery used to improve the refractive state of the eye and decrease or eliminate dependency on glasses or contact lenses. This can include various methods of surgical remodeling of the cornea (keratomileusis), lens implantation or lens replacement. The most common methods today use excimer lasers to reshape the curvature of the cornea. Refractive eye surgeries are used to treat common vision disorders such as myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia and astigmatism.
An Intraocular lens (IOL) is a lens implanted in the eye usually as part of a treatment for cataracts or for correcting other vision problems such as short sightedness and long sightedness, a form of refractive surgery. If the natural lens is left in the eye, the IOL is known as phakic, otherwise it is a pseudophakic lens. Both kinds of IOLs are designed to provide the same light-focusing function as the natural crystalline lens. This can be an alternative to LASIK, but LASIK is not an alternative to an IOL for treatment of cataracts.
Refractive error is a problem with focusing light accurately on the retina due to the shape of the eye and/or cornea. The most common types of refractive error are near-sightedness, far-sightedness, astigmatism, and presbyopia. Near-sightedness results in far away objects being blurry, far-sightedness and presbyopia result in close objects being blurry, and astigmatism causes objects to appear stretched out or blurry. Other symptoms may include double vision, headaches, and eye strain.
A phakic intraocular lens (PIOL) is a special kind of intraocular lens that is implanted surgically into the eye to correct myopia (nearsightedness). It is called "phakic" because the eye's natural lens is left untouched. Intraocular lenses that are implanted into eyes after the eye's natural lens has been removed during cataract surgery are known as pseudophakic.
Cataract surgery, which is also called lens replacement surgery, is the removal of the natural lens of the human eye that has developed a cataract, an opaque or cloudy area. The eye's natural lens is usually replaced with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL).
Pediatric ophthalmology is a sub-speciality of ophthalmology concerned with eye diseases, visual development, and vision care in children.
Singapore General Hospital (SGH) is an academic health science centre and tertiary referral hospital in Singapore. It is located next to the Bukit Merah and Chinatown districts of the Central Region, close to the Outram Community Hospital (OCH), which functions as a supplementary community and rehabilitation hospital to SGH for newly-discharged patients. There is also the Outram Polyclinic to complement outpatient care. All of these institutions are operated by SingHealth, which comes under the purview of the Ministry of Health (MOH).
Singapore Health Services, commonly known as SingHealth, is Singapore's largest group of healthcare institutions. The group was formed in 2000 and consists of four public hospitals, three community hospitals, five national specialty centres and a network of eight polyclinics. The Singapore General Hospital is the largest hospital in the group and serves as the flagship hospital for the cluster.
Astigmatism is a type of refractive error due to rotational asymmetry in the eye's refractive power. This results in distorted or blurred vision at any distance. Other symptoms can include eyestrain, headaches, and trouble driving at night. Astigmatism often occurs at birth and can change or develop later in life. If it occurs in early life and is left untreated, it may result in amblyopia.
Roberto Zaldivar is an Argentinian doctor of ophthalmology and a refractive surgeon. He is credited with several breakthroughs in the use of lasers to correct visual impairments. Zaldivar is credited for a technique called bioptics, a term he introduced.
Blurred vision is an ocular symptom where vision becomes less precise and there is added difficulty to resolve fine details.
The eye, like any other optical system, suffers from a number of specific optical aberrations. The optical quality of the eye is limited by optical aberrations, diffraction and scatter. Correction of spherocylindrical refractive errors has been possible for nearly two centuries following Airy's development of methods to measure and correct ocular astigmatism. It has only recently become possible to measure the aberrations of the eye and with the advent of refractive surgery it might be possible to correct certain types of irregular astigmatism.
Noshir Minoo Shroff is an Indian ophthalmologist, notable for intraocular lens implantation surgery in India and a medical director of the Shroff Eye Centre. The Government of India honoured him in 2010, with the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award, for his services in the field of medicine.
Allon Barsam is a London-based ophthalmologist specializing in cataract surgery, refractive surgery and corneal and external eye disease. Barsam carried out the first human treatments of microwave keratoplasty.
