Blog
EVO ICL
The lens, the sizing problem, and the questions patients ask before committing.
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EVO ICL: sizing, vault and the research
The full guide. What Collamer is and why the central port replaced the laser iridotomy, how the lens is sized and why white-to-white is a proxy rather than a measurement, what vault is and what a good one looks like, the preoperative evaluation, how power is chosen separately from size, the operation itself, recovery day by day, UV protection, and what surgery stays possible afterwards.
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Real Surgeon, Real Results With EVO ICL
Gurpal Virdi, MD is an EVO ICL patient himself. Filmed at Parkhurst NuVision after his own surgery. He has also implanted the lens in his own family, which is the short answer to why so much of this site is about one implant.
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EVO ICL vs LASIK: which procedure suits which eye
LASIK subtracts corneal tissue, EVO ICL adds a removable lens, and almost every practical difference follows from that. Prescription range, thin corneas, dry eye, reversibility, recovery, cost, and where SMILE and PRK sit. Including the case for LASIK, which is often the better operation.
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Is EVO ICL safe? What the FDA data actually shows
Most pages say complications are rare without saying how rare. Here are the three-year FDA trial figures from 629 eyes, the 17,482-report surveillance review, each risk taken one at a time, and the two ways safety statistics get misread: the missing denominator and the missing timeframe.
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How much does EVO ICL cost?
What drives the price, what a quote should include, the monthly-payment arithmetic and why advertised per-month figures understate the real one, HSA and FSA, why prices vary within one city, and the line item worth more than any discount.
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Can you get EVO ICL over 45? The 2026 FDA age change
On 17 February 2026 the FDA expanded the EVO ICL age indication from 21 to 45 out to 21 to 60. A great deal of published material, including pages that still rank well, has not caught up. What age does and does not change clinically.
Research
Cataract surgery and IOL technology
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Cataract surgery and IOL selection
How an intraocular lens is actually chosen. Biometry and the modern power formulas, why predicting where the lens will sit is the largest source of error, why prior LASIK or PRK makes the calculation harder and what to do about it, toric lenses and the posterior cornea, why 3.3% of the correction is lost per degree of misalignment, how monofocal, enhanced monofocal, EDOF, small-aperture and trifocal designs actually differ, the Light Adjustable Lens, refractive targets and blended vision, when a premium lens is the wrong choice, and where AI helps.
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Does Medicare pay 100% for cataract surgery?
Not quite, and the distinction is the most misunderstood thing about paying for it. Medicare covers the operation and a basic lens. It does not cover the decisions that turn it into a refractive procedure.
AI and ophthalmic technology
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AI in ophthalmology, and the evaluation of frontier AI
The four projects and the one idea behind them: VAULT and VAULT-OCT for ICL sizing, ICL Fit as the deployed form of that research, IOL Reference as the lens-technology platform, and EyeLabs AI. Plus the reinforcement-learning and model-evaluation work outside medicine, and where the line currently sits between what machine learning has improved in eye surgery and what it has not.
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IOL Reference
The intraocular lens reference platform I built and maintain, used by cataract surgeons to compare lens designs, optical principles, materials, power and toricity ranges, constants and manufacturer specifications side by side.
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ICL Fit
The AI ICL-sizing tool built on the VAULT and VAULT-OCT models, which I co-founded and engineer.
Laser vision correction and lens surgery
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LASIK and PRK: laser vision correction
How each works, how they differ, who is a candidate, and when EVO ICL is the better option instead.
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SMILE laser vision correction
Flapless correction through a small incision, how it compares with LASIK, and which corneas it suits.
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Refractive lens exchange
Replacing the aging natural lens to address distance and reading vision together, and why it is often the right answer after about 50.
By location
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EVO ICL in San Francisco
How the lens is sized, and the three questions worth asking any San Francisco surgeon.
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EVO ICL in Palo Alto
For the Peninsula: Menlo Park, Mountain View, Redwood City and Los Altos.
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EVO ICL in San Jose
Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino and the wider Silicon Valley.
Patient-facing guides live at ICLSurgery.com, which I co-review, and the sizing models are applied in ICL Fit. My full training, publications and presentations are on the CV.
Educational information, not medical advice. Discuss your specific eyes with a qualified ophthalmologist.