Predicting Post-Operative Visual Acuity for LASIK Surgeries Manish Gupta 1 , Prashant Gupta 1 , Pravin K. Vaddavalli 2 , and Asra Fatima 2 1 Microsoft ({gmanish, prgup}@microsoft.com) 2 L. V.Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) ({pravin, asrafatima}@lvpei.org) Abstract. LASIK (Laser-Assisted in SItu Keratomileusis) surgeries have been quite popular for treatment of myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsighted- ness) and astigmatism over the past two decades. In the past decade, over 10 million LASIK procedures had been performed in the United States alone with an average cost of approximately $2000 USD per surgery. While 99% of such surgeries are successful, the commonest side effect is a residual refractive error and poor uncorrected visual acuity (UCVA). In this work, we aim at predicting the UCVA post LASIK surgery. We model the task as a regression problem and use the patient demography and pre-operative examination details as features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically explore this crit- ical problem using machine learning methods. Further, LASIK surgery settings are often determined by practitioners using manually designed rules. We explore the possibility of determining such settings automatically to optimize for the best post-operative UCVA by including such settings as features in our regression model. Our experiments on a dataset of 791 surgeries provides an RMSE (root mean square error) of 0.102, 0.094 and 0.074 for the predicted post-operative UCVA after one day, one week and one month of the surgery respectively. Keywords: LASIK surgeries, UCVA, Uncorrected visual acuity, Regression 1 Introduction Refractive surgeries for eye are performed to correct (normalize) the refractive state of the eye, to decrease or eliminate dependency on glasses or contact lenses. This can in- clude various methods of surgical remodeling of the cornea or cataract surgery. LASIK is a refractive eye surgery that uses a laser to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness, and/or astigmatism. In LASIK, a thin flap in the cornea is created using either a micro- keratome blade or a femto-second laser. The surgeon folds back the flap, then removes some corneal tissue underneath using a laser. The flap is then laid back in place, cov- ering the area where the corneal tissue was removed. With nearsighted people, the goal of LASIK is to flatten the steep cornea; with farsighted people, a steeper cornea is de- sired. LASIK can also correct astigmatism by smoothing an irregular cornea into a more normal shape. LASIK surgeries are highly popular; over 10 million LASIK procedures have been performed in the United States alone in the past decade 3 . 3 http://www.statista.com/statistics/271478/ number-of-lasik-surgeries-in-the-us/