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DR. AMAR AGARWAL, MS, FRCS, FRCOphth

CHAIRMAN AND MANAGING DIRECTOR
Dr. Agarwal"s Group of Eye Hospitals and Eye Research Centre
19 Cathedral Road, Chennai-600 086, India

Dr. Amar Agarwal is the pioneer of Phakonit which is Phako with a Needle Incision Technology. This technique became popularized as Bimanual phaco, Microincision cataract surgery (MICS) or Microphaco. He is the first to remove cataracts through a 0.7 mm tip with the technique called Microphakonit. He has also discovered No anesthesia cataract surgery and FAVIT a new technique to remove dropped nuclei. The air pump which was a simple idea of using an aquarium fish pump to increase the fluid into the eye in bimanual phaco and co-axial phaco has helped prevent surge. This built the basis of various techniques of forced infusion for small incision cataract surgery.  He has also discovered a new refractive error called Aberropia. He has also been the first to do a combined surgery of microphakonit (700-micron cataract surgery) with a 25-gauge vitrectomy in the same patient thus having the smallest incisions possible for cataract and vitrectomy. He is also the first surgeon to implant a new mirror telescopic IOL (LMI) for patients suffering from age related macular degeneration.

He has also been the first in the world to implant a Glued IOL. In this a PC IOL is fixed in an eye without any capsules using fibrin glue. The Malyugin ring for small pupil cataract surgery was also modified by him as the Agarwal modification of the Malyugin ring for miotic pupil cataract surgeries with posterior capsular defects. Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital has also done for the first time an Anterior segment transplantation in a 4-month-old child with anterior staphyloma. He also has brought out the technique of IOL Scaffold in which a three-piece IOL is injected into an eye between the iris and the nucleus to prevent the nucleus from falling down in posterior capsular ruptures. He has combined Glued IOL and IOL scaffold in cases of PC rupture where there is no iris or capsular support and termed the technique Glued IOL Scaffold. Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital has also done for the first time a glued endocapsular ring in cases of subluxated cataract.

Pre Descemet’s Endothelial Keratoplasty or PDEK was started by Prof. Agarwal. In this the Pre Descemets layer and the Descemet’s membrane with endothelium are transplanted en bloc in patients with diseased endothelium. Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital has also done for the first time CACXL or Contact lens assisted collagen cross linking a new technique for cross linking thin corneas and have also worked on E PDEK in which an endoilluminator is used to assist in PDEK surgeries. Dr. Agarwal has designed the new instrument called the Trocar anterior chamber maintainer now in complicated cases which helps give infusion through the anterior chamber and works like a trocar cannula. He has also started a new technique of iris suturing called Single pass Four Throw (SFT) pupilloplasty. He was the principal investigator for the Bausch and Lomb study in the first human eyes using hypersonic vitrectomy with Vitesse. The first 20 surgeries of posterior vitrectomy were done at Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, Chennai, India. He was also the first in the world to use hypersonic vitrectomy with the Vitesse for a case of PC rupture with nuclear fragments. He did an anterior vitrectomy posterior vitrectomy and nuclear fragment removal with the same Vitesse 23 g probe.

Dr. Agarwal has performed more than 150 live surgeries at various conferences. His videos have won many awards at the film festivals of ASCRS, AAO and ESCRS. He has also written more than 60 books which have been published in various languages- English, Spanish and Polish. He also trains doctors from all over the world in his center on Phaco, Glued IOL, Lasik and Retinal surgeries. He is the Past President of International Society of Refractive Surgery (ISRS) and also the Secretary General of Indian Intraocular Implant and Refractive Society (IIRSI). He is the Chairman and Managing Director of Dr. Agarwal’s Group of Eye Hospitals which has 75 eye hospitals all over the world. He can be contacted at dragarwal@vsnl.com. The website of the hospital is http://www.dragarwal.com.