The developers’ goal was to create a free online tool that helps ophthalmologists aggregate the major online IOL calculators in one site, allowing them to get multiple results with only one data entry session.
“This will reduce typing mistakes, provide a better view, and allow users to compare results, eventually helping to get better refractive outcomes,” Dante Luis Buonsanti told EuroTimes.
The developers used a technique called web scraping. This is the sort of thing seen when using a hotel or air travel search engine. Web scraping uses bots to extract content from several websites and sends it to a single site. The user can then compare results from seven current calculators: Barrett Universal II, Cooke K6, Evo, Hill-RBF, Hoffer QST, Kane, and PEARL GDS. The site also “scraped” a comprehensive list of IOLs with optimized constants from IOL.com.
The ESCRS online IOL calculator is now live at iolcalculator.escrs.org.