From MIT’s Technology Review comes a brief article of how two Berkeley grad students are improving the scanning process used in Lasik corneal surgery. Right now, expensive scanners do less-than-perfect work, but the Berkeley boys are developing a cheaper, better alternative:
…researchers in the Microfabrication Laboratory used inexpensive techniques to build a microscale scanner that moves up to 30,000 times per second, up from the 4,000 times per second of conventional technology. Graduate students Hyuck Choo and David Garmire invented a way to carve one piece of silicon into two interlocked comblike structures. Applying a voltage to one comb makes the other move up or down. A mirror attached to the combs redirects a laser beam. .
More from Berkeley’s Microfab Lab page…
Flashback: Do-it-yourself LASIK (a hoax, for now…)
