Prof. Dr. Banu Coşar

Her subspecialties are cornea, cataract–refractive and oculoplastic surgery. In practice this covers laser correction of myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism, cataract and trifocal lens surgery, phakic lenses, keratoconus treatment, corneal transplantation, eyelid surgery and paediatric eye disease. Whether a particular procedure suits you is decided after an examination, not from the prescription alone.

Suitability depends on age, on how stable your prescription has been, and above all on the cornea itself — its thickness and its topography. Candidates are generally over eighteen with a prescription that has not changed for about a year. The examination is what decides it: an eye with a thin or irregular cornea may be better served by a phakic lens or a lens exchange than by laser.

They differ in how the cornea is opened before it is reshaped. Femto-LASIK creates the flap with a femtosecond laser rather than a blade; i-LASIK adds a measurement of your eye’s own optical errors to the treatment plan. SMILE removes a small lenticule of tissue through a keyhole incision instead of lifting a flap. PRK, LASEK and EpiLASIK work on the surface, without a flap at all. Corneal thickness usually narrows the list before preference does.

It can, depending on the lens chosen. A cataract operation replaces the clouded natural lens with an artificial one, and a trifocal — or “smart” — lens is designed to give distance, intermediate and near focus. Not every eye is suited to a trifocal lens; the decision takes into account the state of the cornea and the retina as well as how you use your eyes day to day.

Cross-linking stiffens a cornea that is thinning and steepening, and its purpose is to stop or greatly slow progression — it does not always flatten the cornea. Intracorneal ring segments can flatten it where the shape allows. When the cornea has lost its transparency or its shape is beyond either, a layered transplant such as DALK may be considered. Keratoconus usually begins in adolescence and tends to progress until around the age of thirty-five, which is why the timing of treatment matters.

A full-thickness graft replaces the whole cornea. A layered transplant replaces only the diseased part — DALK the front layers, leaving your own innermost layer in place, and DMEK only that innermost layer. Because the cornea normally has no blood vessels, no tissue matching is needed for either. Which is appropriate depends on which layers the disease has affected.

Prof. Coşar consults in Turkish and English. For other languages, interpreters can be arranged through the international patient team so that the examination findings and the options can be discussed clearly.

Yes. A video consultation is useful for reviewing your prescription history, previous eye reports and any corneal imaging, and for outlining the possible options. A decision on surgery, however, needs an in-person eye examination — corneal topography and measurements of the eye cannot be taken remotely.