SMILE was developed in the beginning of 2000, and immediately gained enormous popularity in the entire world. During the last 15 years opthalmologists carried out hundreds of thousands of successful operations. Statistics shows the high degree of patients satisfaction, for those who went through the SMILE correction, and this fact guarantees reliability and quality of this operation. Two distinctive special features of SMILE surgery – opportunity to correct vision through the minimum section of cornea, with no need for creating the corneal flap, and also the use of the only one femtosecund VisuMax laser both for the section and for correction itself. In comparison: the size of section during the operation of LASIK – 20mm, and SMILE -2-4 mm). The major advantage of SMILE is that there is no flap cutting, which may minimize the induction of spherical aberration and eliminates the incidence of striae. Without the potential for spherical aberration, patients treated using the smile technique are more likely to achieve better quality of vision than patients treated with an Excimer laser. This is especially true for those with high myopia.
SMILE may also offer better biomechanical stability than procedures employing flap creation, along with less postoperative discomfort and a lower incidence of dry eye.
With no potential for flap displacement, even after trauma, smile is the best procedure for those who are involved in contact sports. Unlike Excimer laser-based procedures, SMILE uses a solid-state laser, and therefore, there is no need for consumable gases or tight environmental humidity control. The VisuMax is a silent, soft, and gentle laser. It does not produce a smell, there is no vision blackout during the procedure, and the cornea is not forced into a nonphysiological planar shape. As a result, deformation and artifacts can be avoided in the cutting results as well as unnecessarily high intraocular pressure.
In spite of everything said, and also the entire revolutionary character and proved reliability of SMILE laser correction, it is important to remember that the choice of the operation (SMILE or LASIK) that suites different people is a very individual question and the final solution always depends exclusively on the eye test results and analysis of each patients individual situation.