Tooth In Eye Surgery

This technique is called Osteo-Odonto Keratoprosthesis and it's for treatment of certain blind people.

Basically when you have severe damage to the cornea and other treatments don't work you have the option of undergoing this procedure where they use a plastic optical device and a canine tooth with its surrounding tissue to create a new cornea for you, thus fixing your blindness.

They do it two separate operations. In the first operation scar tissue, the inside of the eyelid, and the corneal surface are all removed. A canine tooth and its corresponding tissue are removed and fashioned so that it can receive the plastic optical device. This is implanted in the cheek so it can get a new blood supply. They then remove a lining from the patient's cheek to cover the patient's eye until the second surgery is done about 4 months later.

In the second surgery they open up lining placed over the eye and remove the inner contents of the eye. Then the tooth device is removed from the cheek and implanted in the eye. The mucosal lining that was over the eye is now put around the implanted device.

It's been around for a while but has gotten a lot of new attention now because if it's relatively high success rate (roughly 65%) and it's low rate of complications.

I found it very interesting that we could create an artificial cornea out of a tooth. Also, sometimes surgeons get a bad reputation for lack of innovation in terms of surgical procedure. They are comfortable using the tools they learned to use and don't like newer ones all that time. I guess in this case the was no new equipment being used but still, a new technique was developed successfully.
http://www.ndc.com.sg/Newsroom/MediaRelease/OOKP25May05.htm

John Li
501