Types of Equipment Used for Your Eye Exam

You may consider eye exams a not-so-high-priority activity, but annual visits with your ophthalmologist help you see more clearly and detect a number of serious diseases that, when caught early, can be treated more easily.

At Omphroy Eye Care, the office of Luis C. Omphroy, MD, in Aiea, Hawaii, your annual eye exam is comprehensive and includes testing for your visual acuity (whether you need glasses or contact lenses), as well as testing for common but serious eye diseases, such as glaucoma, macular degeneration, and retinal problems.

Most people aren’t familiar with the state-of-the-art technology we use in our practice, so we’d like to take the opportunity to shed some light on the subject.

Types of equipment in an eye exam

Dr. Omphroy dilates your eyes for the exam so he can see the internal structures better. The drops aren’t painful, but you’re light-sensitive for a few hours, so bring a pair of sunglasses for the drive home.

To visualize the internal structures, Dr. Omphroy performs an ophthalmoscopy (fundoscopy) using a Haag-Streit slit lamp to magnify his field of view. 

You sit in a chair and rest your chin and forehead against the equipment. The lamp shines a bright light into each eye to illuminate the cornea, lens, retina, optic nerve, and surrounding blood vessels under high magnification, providing him with detailed information about each.

Diseases like glaucoma rob you of your peripheral vision, so Dr. Omphroy performs a test to determine how much you can see outside your clear, central vision. He starts low-tech, holding up a finger or an object and gradually moving it from side to side and up and down. You follow the finger with just your eyes. 

If he suspects a deficit, he schedules you to come back to take a more precise version of the test with the computerized Octopus visual field analyzer.

Another test for glaucoma detects the internal pressure in your eyes. Dr. Omphroy puts drops in your eyes to numb them. Then he uses a tonometer, which blows a small puff of air onto the cornea (membrane covering the eye surface) to measure the pressure. 

An alternative test is an applanation tonometer. The doctor rests a flat-tipped cone gently against your cornea and measures how much pressure is required to flatten a portion of it.

To evaluate the health of the cornea, retina, and optic nerve, Dr. Omphroy relies on Maestro optical coherence tomography. Using either a digital camera or a computerized low-power imaging scanning system, he can obtain thousands of images of the inner eye in a few seconds. 

The patterns it reveals give him information about the health of various structures. The iTrace™ topographer also allows him to diagnose pathology of the cornea.

To learn more about the equipment we use to ensure your eye health, or to schedule an eye exam with Dr. Omphroy, give our office a call at 808-491-6513 today.