Keranova, the start-up who reinvents ophthalmic surgery with its robotic laser
The French nugget Keranova has developed a fully autonomous "lancet optics" to treat cataract, based on a laser technology ultra-fast wavefront. Its founder, Fabrice Romano, details the operation of this unique technology in the world.
The robotic arm of Keranova is positioned very precisely on the eye and performs a photoemulsification with a femtosecond laser dynamic wavefront. © Keranova, YouTube
Today, cataract surgery is the most widely performed surgical procedure in the world, with 25 million patients being removed and replaced every year, 830,000 of them in France alone. Figures are constantly increasing in view of the aging of the population. This is to say if the machine invented by the start-up Keranova, located in Saint-Etienne, will interest the world
A high-speed laser whose wavefront is dynamically and programmatically modified
In 2015, Fabrice Romano, a specialist in ophthalmic surgery, spotted a revolutionary laser in the research laboratories of Jean-Monnet University in Saint-Etienne. Already the founder of an eye therapy start-up in 2008 (EyeTechCare, a technology to treat glaucoma from high-intensity ultrasound), the entrepreneur immediately imagines how this laser could be used for ophthalmic surgery.
"Today, a surgical laser makes an incision line by line, by the displacement of a single laser spot, describes Fabrice Romano. Our laser moves it a matrix of spots, generated by modification of the wavefront whose shape and topography fits in a programmed and dynamic way ".
Depending on the number of spots, their distance and their disposition, it is possible to cut or ablate in an ultra-precise and ultra-fast manner. "Where it takes 10 to 20 seconds to achieve a corneal flap [ed: cutting and lifting of the cornea] in myopia surgery, our machine operates in half a second! It's like comparing a bike to a race car, "enthuses the entrepreneur.
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