Predicting Post-Operative Visual Acuity for LASIK Surgeries

LASIK (Laser-Assisted in SItu Keratomileusis) surgeries have been quite popular for treatment of myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsightedness) and astigmatism over the past two decades. In the past decade, over 10 million LASIK procedures had been performed in the United States alone with an average cost of approximately $2000 USD per surgery. While 99% of such surgeries are successful, the commonest side effect is a residual refractive error and poor uncorrected visual acuity (UCVA). In this work, we aim at predicting the UCVA post LASIK surgery. We model the task as a regression problem and use the patient demography and pre-operative examination details as features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically explore this critical problem using machine learning methods. Further, LASIK surgery settings are often determined by practitioners using manually designed rules. We explore the possibility of determining such settings automatically to optimize for the best post-operative UCVA by including such settings as features in our regression model. Our experiments on a dataset of 791 surgeries provides an RMSE (root mean square error) of 0.102, 0.094 and 0.074 for the predicted post-operative UCVA after one day, one week and one month of the surgery respectively.