Optical aberrations in ametropic eyes and their change with corneal refractive surgery

• Main Author: Llorente, Lourdes
• Published: City, University of London 2009
• Subjects: 617.7; RE Ophthalmology
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.507454

In this thesis the laser ray tracing (LRT) technique for measurement of ocular aberrations has been implemented, validated and applied, in conjunction with complementary techniques, to the study of ocular aberrations in human eyes. In particular, we studied optical aberrations in myopic and hyperopic eyes and the optical changes induced by refractive surgery for myopia and hyperopia. We have studied the impact of the optimisation of some experimental parameters on the estimation of the wave aberration. We demonstrated that although the polarisation state and wavelength of the illumination light affected the intensity patterns of the images obtained using reflectometric aberrometry (LRT and Hartmann Shack sensor), these changes did not affect the estimation of aberrations. We also showed that the difference in the defocus term (focus shift) due to the use of different wavelengths is in agreement with the Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration of the Indiana Chromatic Eye Model for average normal eyes, although intersubject variability is not negligible. In addition, we studied experimentally the influence of the geometrical distribution and density of the pupil sampling on the estimation of aberrations using artificial and normal human eyes, and performed numerical simulations to extend our results to "abnormal"eyes. We found that the spatial distribution of the samples can be more important than the number of samples, for both our measured as well as our simulated "abnormal" eyes. Experimentally, we did not find large differences across patterns except, as expected, for undersampled patterns. We found that hyperopic eyes tended to have more positive asphericity and greater total and corneal spherical aberrati on than myopic eyes, as well as greater 3rd and higher order aberrations. Although we found no significant differences between groups in terms of internal aberrations, internal spherical aberration showed a significant age-related shift toward less negative values in the hyperopic group. We also assessed the impact of the LASIK corneal surgery, a popular surgical technique for correction of refractive errors, on the optical quality for both myopic and hyperopic standard techniques. Third and higher order ocular and an terior corneal aberrations increased with the surgery. Ocular and corneal spherical aberration changed towards more positive values with myopic LASIK, and towards more negative values with hyperopic LASIK. Changes in internal spherical aberration were of opposite sign than those induced in corneal spherical aberration. Changes induced by hyperopic LASIK were larger than those induced by myopic LASIK for a similar attempted correction.