After eighteen months of clinical use across the original tool, we’re launching CAIRSPlan 2.0 — a complete rebuild from the ground up, designed around how CAIRS planning actually happens at the table.
The original cairsplan.com served 143 surgeons globally and gave us an enormous amount of feedback about what worked and what didn’t. CAIRSPlan 2.0 is the answer.
A clean migration for everyone
Every existing CAIRSPlan account has been migrated. All 143 surgeons retain their existing credentials — log in with the same username and password you used before, and your account is rehashed automatically on first sign-in.
Saved plans, parameters and topography images from the original tool stay with the legacy version, which remains online at legacy.cairsplan.com for surgeons in the middle of treatment plans. No surgeon needs to do anything to keep working.
What’s new in 2.0
1. A real geometry engine
The biggest invisible change. Vendor topography exports — Pentacam, eventually Sirius and others — are now standardised into a canonical 201×201 grid at 0.05 mm resolution before any planning happens. That means every plan, regardless of the device the surgeon uses, is computed against the same coordinate system, the same units, the same conventions.
Sign and unit ambiguities that previously had to be resolved by the surgeon are now resolved at the device-adaptor layer. PHI is stripped at the same point — the planning engine never sees patient identifiers.
2. Multi-nomogram support
CAIRSPlan 2.0 ships with three nomogram systems:
- Brisbane 2026 — our latest, refined from 85 published eyes plus a further two years of post-publication outcomes.
- Istanbul (KeraNatural) — the protocol used widely across Europe.
- Awwad — the alternative North American system.
Each nomogram has its own size presets and ring geometry. Switching between them mid-plan recomputes everything cleanly.
3. CAIRSPlan Auto
A one-click starting point. The new auto-planner reads the topography’s ectasia pattern (Bowtie, Snowman, etc.), peak axis and decentration, and proposes:
- Single or twin segment configuration
- Segment axis aligned to the cone
- Channel inner/outer diameter
- Initial width and thickness
You then refine. It removes the blank-canvas problem when planning a difficult cornea.
4. Per-segment custom geometry
Each segment can run in Normal mode (uniform width and thickness) or Custom mode, which exposes three-point control: independent width and thickness at the start, midpoint and end of the arc. For the asymmetric corneas where uniform segments don’t quite fit, this is the difference between a clean plan and a compromised one.
5. Linked and unlinked incisions
Two-segment plans now support Linked incisions (equal-and-opposite movement; positions track with segment axis, offset-preserving) or Unlinked for independent control. The default — linked — keeps complex plans tidy without giving up flexibility when a particular cornea needs it.
6. Save / load multiple plans per scan
You can now save several named plans against a single scan and switch between them. Useful for showing a patient comparative options, or for documenting a planned approach versus what was actually done.
7. Ectasia pattern classification
The viewer now classifies ectasia patterns automatically — Bowtie, Snowman and other topographic phenotypes — alongside the elevation, curvature and pachymetry heatmaps. Clinically relevant; also feeds the auto-planner.
8. PHI-free by design
The new architecture is structurally PHI-free. Patient identifiers are stripped during device adaptation; planning storage uses an HDF5 format with no patient fields. If you choose to associate a plan with a patient, that link lives separately and never enters the planning pipeline.
9. Faster everything
The new tool runs the topography through a deterministic Python pipeline (independent of the web layer), with HDF5 storage and async processing. Upload to first heatmap is several times faster than the legacy tool, and re-runs against the same scan are near-instant.
What’s coming next
A few things are on the immediate roadmap:
- Variable-width segment rendering on the canvas — drawing the tapered arcs from 3-point custom data, so the plan you see matches exactly what gets implanted.
- PDF / structured plan export — printable surgical plans for theatre.
- Interactive Plotly viewer — replacing static heatmaps with hover-able, scrollable maps.
- Pre/post comparison — pair pre-op and post-op scans on the same plan.
- Pentacam U12 support — the inspector is in; the adaptor follows.
- Zernike decomposition — calculated from the canonical geometry.
Open it
The legacy tool remains at legacy.cairsplan.com for surgeons mid-plan.
For tool support, account questions or feedback: info@cairsplan.com.