Laser eye treatment is two decades old, and adept surgeons have gone far beyond giving patients 20:20 vision. Times Online has profiled several such doctors, who offer to tailor their clients' eyesight to their occupation.

Julian Stevens, who practices at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, has given special forces members and fighter pilots the aforementioned ability to see a thousand meters in the dark, and he notes that taxi drivers could benefit from a similar procedure. Stephen Trokel, who helped pioneer laser eye surgery, operated on a soprano who wanted to be able to read the music in the front row of the orchestra, as well as a New York Yankees catcher who needed to be able to see the ball coming out of the light. Another group that favors the occupational ocular enhancements? US presidential candidates, several of whom have received "monovision," which allows them to easily read with one eye and see far away with the other. This combination eliminates the need for reading glasses or bifocals, and some politicians hope it creates a sense of youthfulness.

What do we have to thank for this custom technology? The space program. Wavefront technology, which was developed by NASA to improve the focus of the Hubble Space Telescope, has translated neatly to the human eye. The technology allows physicians to map the cornea and iris, enabling surgeons to make small, specific tweaks to the eye that result in custom eyesight made to order.

Surgeons offer eyesight tailored to an individual's life and career [Times Online via Reddit]

Together with the recent development of an automatic anesthesia machine, the automated robot surgeon presents an eerie prospect for the operating room of tomorrow: it may be completely uninhabited by people except you, the patient. Perhaps a technician will look on from behind a two-way mirror; perhaps not.

There's a long way to go before that happens. For example, robots will have to learn to adapt to unforeseen complications during surgery. But what would you think if the OR at your local hospital looked more like an assembly line at General Motors and less like a place where people are healed? Would you trust a robot to cut you apart then sew you back up, good as new?

Source: PhysOrg

Image: Medgadget

1. Heart valves. We haven't got a replacement for your heart yet — though a lot of people are researching it — but you can replace your heart valves with artificial ones like those manufactured by ATS Medical. These simple-looking device are fitted to your heart, opening and closing with each beat of your heart to push the blood through your body. Without heart valves, your heart has to work much harder to pump and will grow enlarged — generally a condition that leads to death. Many people are born without a heart valve, or lose one in a heart attack. They can also be replaced by heart valves from a dead human or pig.

2. Bladder. Tissue engineers have successfully grown bladders from human bladder cells, then transplanted them back into the patients whose malformed or damaged bladders provided the cell samples. Several people have received these synthetic biological bladders since 2006. They are beta bladders, and the patients aren't always continent. But now they have full-sized bladders when they didn't before, and that dramatically improves quality of life. So you can survive if you lose your bladder — just as long as you've got a few bladder cells left for tissue engineers to grow you a new one.

3. Large intestine. Many people with colitis — an immuno-deficiency disease that causes inflammation and tearing of the colon — have colectomies to remove the entire organ. But that doesn't mean they have to wear a colostomy bag. Surgeons can use a section of the small intestine to create a J-shaped pouch inside your body that acts as a surrogate colon. It's not as big as your large intestine was, so you have to visit the bathroom a bit more often. But you don't have to wear a bag, and you're surviving just fine with no colon at all.

4. Stomach. Like your large intestine, your stomach can be completely removed. Usually this is done when you have stomach cancer. The esophagus (the pipe that routes food from your mouth to your stomach) is rerouted to connect to your small intestine, and the surgeon can widen the small intestine in that area to create a surrogate stomach. Food goes through the same digestive process as before, but you can't absorb as much vitamin B12. So you may have to get bi-annual injections of the vitamin. 5. Kidneys. You've probably heard about kidney dialysis, where people with kidneys that don't function get stuck in a giant machine that de-toxifies their blood for hours. It's a crappy process, but it does mean that you can live without a kidney. The good news, though, is that there is now a wearable dialysis device, pictured above, which you put on your body like a belt. It doesn't work quite as well as dialysis, but it does the trick and many patients prefer it to the weekly dialysis clinic visit. We've written about the kidney dialysis wearable, and heart valves, before.

Top image "The Food" from artist Jeanne Dunning.

According to a story in Reuters:

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spare parts for humans a step closer to reality. [Lead researcher Riitta Suuronen] and her colleagues . . . isolated stem cells from the patient's fat and grew them for two weeks in a specially formulated nutritious soup that included the patient's own blood serum.

In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells — immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said. The block was later transplanted into the patient's head and connected to the skull bone using screws and microsurgery to connect arteries and veins to the vessels of the neck.

Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw [Reuters]

It was only a matter of time before somebody publicly accused the surgeons of grandstanding. After all, the 27-hours operation involved a spinal separation, a quadruple amputation, a kidney transplant, and a pelvic reconstruction. We've been scanning reports since Lakshmi emerged from the operating theater, to find out if the marathon surgery introduced anything innovative. It was complicated, but evidently nothing new. Really, if they wanted to impress us with cutting-edge surgery, they would have added more limbs, not taken them away.

Questioning the ethics of Lakshmi's doctors [The Hindu]

Plus, there's the whole cost issue. 4k to 7k, or this for a mere $20.71? Or you could pick up a Sharpie for about $1.50 and just draw the lines on yourself. Either way, you do the math.

If men start going through with this upgrade, you have to wonder... will women start checking out the gut and asking their friends, "Hey, see that hottie the bar? Think they're fake?"

Only time will tell.

Six-Pack Surgery, From Puffy To Buff [WSJ]