Continuing with our series about routine cataract cases, today we present a routine phaco chop surgery. The cataract is chopped into halves and then into smaller pieces within the capsular bag. The patient in this video is more than 90 years old with a reasonably dense cataract and that carries its own challenges as we have shown in a previous post and video.
Previous videos have shown the combo chop and phaco chop with floppy iris syndrome, but today we are going to focus on the routine cases. More than 90% of the cataract surgeries that we do every week consists of routine cases, so we should spent a considerable effort analyzing and then optimizing these types of procedures.
Phaco chop is my favorite technique and I tend to use it in many different forms:
- vertical chop
- horizontal chop
- combo chop
- flip-and-chop
- stop-and-chop
- and more… there are many possible variations
This is a technique that you must master during your learning stages. While I can appreciate a well-performed divide-and-conquer technique, the increase in safety and efficiency from the phaco chop technique will win nearly every time. The caveat is that learning phaco chop can be more of a challenge than learning divide-and-conquer. But the same was said decades ago when people compared divide-and-conquer to the one-handed bowl-out techniques of phaco.
Click below for a routine phaco chop technique cataract surgery:
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