Many patients desire a refractive correction at the same time as cataract surgery. This makes sense because we can correct a large degree of spherical refractive error as well as astigmatism with proper planning.
The phaco incision that we use during cataract surgery can have a significant effect on the astigmatism of the eye, and it needs to be accounted for in our calculations.
Many ophthalmologists split astigmatism patients into two primary groups: eyes that have with-the-rule (WTR) astigmatism and eyes that have against-the-rule (ATR) astigmatism (Figure 1). A smaller number of patients