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The Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth are the receivers of new technology that allows corneal transplants to take place that takes the grand total time of under half an hour to complete.The Hospital report that the cutting edge technology being utilized is treating a patient within twenty minutes, with neither stitches or injections needing to be given. They claim that seventy percent of their outpatients achieve enough restored vision to be able to drive within a month of the operation.Corneal disease normally effects people who are over the age sixty five when it becomes to cloud over. The new procedure being demonstrated so successfully by the QA Hospital is called endothelial tranplantation. The treatment has been on the market for almost four years now but it has been the introduction of a new instrument from developers Gebauer that has revolutionized the surgery time and recovery for patients.The microkeratome is a highly accurate piece of kit that has helped to push the boundaries of corneal transplants. Currently it is only available in just six other hospitals in the UK. It allows surgeons to graft corneal transplant tissue to less than one tenth of a millimeter using anesthetic eye drops and nothing more.The new microkeratome has reduced the procedure time from just over two hours plus the need for a patient to be admitted. The recovery period then was almost two years as well.
This procedure is already proving very exciting within the field and it is hoped that more hospitals will accept it as a future development.