Diagnostic Services at The Eye Center
At The Eye Centre we have the most advanced equipment to help assess and evaluate the diseases that affect the human eye. We are happy to provide your images and diagnostic reports in most formats, as we understand that in certain circumstances your records will be needed to assist other physicians involved in your care. This service is particularly helpful to our patients who live outside Karachi and the archives mean that you are not dependent on a particular doctor if you need your record years later.
Our current diagnostic facilities include:
1. Digital Anterior Segment Imaging system
This imaging suite allows us to take high quality images of several different areas of the eye. This gives us the ability to accurately document the nature of the disease, thereby enabling a more accurate and objective followup.
2. Digital optic nerve and fundus photography
Fundus photography allows us to examine the optic nerve and document its structure. These images also tell us a great deal about the structural relationships within the nerve. The documentation also helps us analyze change over time.
For people who may have glaucoma, optic nerve imaging is a important part of glaucoma management. Fundus photography is the ability to image the posterior segment or the back of the eye and allows us to look at tissue such as the retina and blood vessels. This is an important test, particularly in diabetics to assess the severity of complications from the disease. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of preventable blindness world-wide and your endocrinologist or general practitioner will be interested in obtaining this diagnostic information to help them manage your disease.
Fundus photography is also important in the case of several neurologic, rheumatologic and vascular diseases and helps specialists in other areas view changes elsewhere in the human body. For instance, inflammation resulting from autoimmune diseases will often manifest in the human eye.
3. Digital Flourescein Angiography
This test employs the use of a non-iodionated dye that is injected in a vein through your arm and helps take very detailed timed images of the blood circulation through the eye. This test is very much like an angiogram of the heart and helps diagnose several different kinds of eye diseases. It is not a painful test and does not require hospital admission. It takes about 30 minutes to perform, not including time required for pupillary dilation.
5. Anterior Segment OCT
Optical Coherence Tomography or imaging by sections or sectioning, through the use of any kind of penetrating wave helps us see parts of the eye that we are not able to see with the human eye. It is a computer-aided reconstruction of the deeper layers of the retina and the optic nerve. It provides a tomograph that helps us understand disease in 3D. We are also able to use it to look at different structures of the eye and grade them as time goes on.
6. 3D Glaucoma and Macula OCT using Topcon’s superb Spectral Domain OCT
7. Pachymetry
This diagnostic examines the thickness of the cornea which is important in terms of refractive surgery, laser correction for vision as well as disease. We use an ocular pachymeter which is the most accurate one.
8. Keratometry
9. Biometry using Haag Streit Lens Star 900
This is an optical biometer that gives us a host of calculations on the human eye which are needed when we do cataract surgery or implant ocular lens. It is based on nomograms, or alignment charts. As the machine receives software updates as they take place elsewhere in the world, we run in-stream with global data.
10. Visual Field Analyzer with both regular and SWAP (Short Wavelength Automated Permimetry)
This helps us determine what is affecting the eye if you have diseases such as glaucoma or something that affects your retina or inherited retinal dystrophy. It is also helpful when neurological problems such as tumours develop or a stroke has taken place. It examines how your visual field has been constricted. This diagnostic service is of particular help to neurologists and neurosurgeons as the retina is a part of the human brain and when they cannot ‘see’ inside the brain they can use our analytics to access it through the retina.
