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Major decisions regarding life and death are routinely made on the modern battlefield, where visual function of the individual soldier can be of critical importance in the decision-making process. Glasses in the combat environment have considerable disadvantages: degradation of short term visual performance can occur as dust and sweat accumulate on lenses during a mission or patrol; long term visual performance can diminish as lenses become increasingly scratched and pitted; during periods of intense physical trauma, glasses can be knocked off the soldier’s face and lost or broken. Although refractive surgery offers certain benefits on the battlefield when compared to wearing glasses, it is not without potential disadvantages. As a byproduct of refractive surgery, elevated optical aberrations can be induced, causing decreases in contrast sensitivity and increases in the symptoms of glare, halos, and starbursts. Typically, these symptoms occur under low light level conditions, the same conditions under which most military operations are initiated. With the advent of wavefront aberrometry, we are now seeing correction not only of myopia and astigmatism but of other, smaller optical aberrations that can cause the above symptoms. In collaboration with the Warfighter Refractive Eye Surgery Program and Research Center (WRESP-RC) at Fort Belvoir and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC), the overall objective of this study is to determine the impact of wavefront guided (WFG) versus wavefront-optimized (WFO) photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) on military task visual performance. Psychophysical perception testing was conducted before and after surgery to measure each participant’s performance regarding target detection and identification using thermal imagery. The results are presented here.
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