Myopia, or nearsightedness, causes light from far away to focus in front of the retina inside the eye, leading to a blurred image.  This occurs if the eyeball is too long or the cornea is too steep.  No matter the cause, nearsightedness  can be corrected by flattening the cornea.  The opposite can be said for hyperopia, or farsightedness.  One of the early approaches to flattening the cornea involving making several radial incisions on the corneal called radial keratectomy.  Another procedure called keratomileusis, involved removing the front surface of the cornea and removing tissue from the cap using a lathe.  Kerato is greek for cornea and mileusis is greek for carve.

In the early 1980s, researches at IBM were using a laser known as an excimer laser to etch microchips at the microscopic level.  This laser used photoablation to remove small amounts of material using photons, while doing no damage to the surrounding material.  They hypothesized that this laser could be used to ablate animal tissue so they brought some Thanksgiving turkey to the lab to show that tissue could be safely removed using this laser without damage surrounding tissue.  Once this was discovered, ophthalmologists began using the laser to perform keratomileusis on the surface of the cornea which became known as photorefractive keratomileusis, or PRK.  

It was later discovered that this procedure could be formed under a flap of corneal tissue in order to make the procedure more comfortable to the patient.  This was called laser in-situ keratomileusis, or LASIK.  

The LASIK flap was originally cut using a blade called a microkeratome.  Iowa Eye Center was the first facility in the state of Iowa to perform LASIK using a femptosecond laser, which is now how the majority of LASIK is performed.  Iowa Eye Center continues to stay on the cutting edge of LASIK technology, while still maintaining our focus on the patient experience.