The anniversary meeting of the users of ZEISS ReLEx SMILE club took place on December 7th in St. Petersburg.
It is the fifth SMILE club format meeting of ophthalmologists working in the field of refractive surgery. ZEISS ReLEx SMILE technology is becoming more accessible in Russia, and the number of club members is growing. This year, ophthalmologists from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar, Nizhny Novgorod, Tambov, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Ufa and Kazan took part in the event.
At the meeting, the club members shared their practical experience and offered their methodological achievements in the application of SMILE technology, discussed interesting clinical cases, prospects for the development of the method.
Particular attention was paid to the issues of interaction with patients, information about modern methods of laser vision correction, organization of the clinic’s work process for better results.
The year 2017 marked an anniversary not only for the Russian club, but in general for the ZEISS ReLEx SMILE technology: this technology has been successfully used for 10 years. To date, more than 20,000 operations have been conducted in Russia, and the number of SMILE correction procedures in the world has exceeded 1,000,000. More than 1300 surgeons from 65 countries of the world use this technology in their practice and their number continues to grow.
ReLEX SMILE procedure for vision correction appeared in Russia in 2011, the first operations were carried out at the Clinical Hospital of the Presidential Affairs Department. Today, 17 clinics in Russia and the CIS are equipped with a ZEISS VisuMax femtosecond laser and carry out ReLEX SMILE operations.