New scanner aids

diagnosis of glaucoma

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- Dr. Richard Dannenberg is proud to say he's the first kid on the block to have a laser than can scan patient's eyes for signs of glaucoma.

"With patients, it's mostly fascination (with the equipment's graphics)," Dannenberg explained. "But it helps people identify their disease. For a patient, it makes glaucoma real and now they do go home and take their drops, whereas before they might not have."

The laser, known as an HRT, or Heidelberg Retina Topograph, effectively replaces older methods of diagnosing glaucoma. It uses a laser to see all the way back to a patient's optic nerve and identifies trouble spots that a human eye usually can't catch. It measures the depth, size and number of a patient's nerve fibers.

The technology became available about two years ago, but Dannenberg said it only became affordable in the last year.

"I had to sell my soul to get it," he quipped.

Having the laser ends what Dannenberg called "a parlor game" that eye doctors used to play when diagnosing a patient's eyes. He said incidents of glaucoma surgery are "down drastically" because of improvements in technology and medicine and increased patient awareness of glaucoma.

Dannenberg's staff now use the HRT for routine eye examinations and save each patient's test results for use in comparisons with later tests. He said the ability to compare those results help in catching potential eye problems before they become serious.

"The whole idea is to catch it before you lose vision," Dannenberg said.

The scanner works very much like a CT scan in that it takes electronic images of an eye piece by piece, which allows for 3D images that technicians can rotate and examine and pinpoint where a patient's eye problems are happening.