Measurement of the wave-front aberration of the eye by a fast psychophysical procedure

TLDR

The technique enables measurement of eye aberrations during accommodation without pharmacological pupil dilation. A fast psychophysical procedure measured angular deviations of light rays at various pupillary locations by aligning a point‑source image with a fixation cross, and the resulting data were fitted to a Zernike series to reconstruct pupil wave‑front aberrations. The method yields repeatability of individual coefficient measurements at 0.019 µm and an overall wave‑height estimation standard deviation below 0.3 µm, while mild dilating agents alter the aberration structure.

Abstract

We used a fast psychophysical procedure to determine the wave-front aberrations of the human eye in vivo. We measured the angular deviation of light rays entering the eye at different pupillary locations by aligning an image of a point source entering the pupil at different locations to the image of a fixation cross entering the pupil at a fixed location. We fitted the data to a Zernike series to reconstruct the wave-front aberrations of the pupil. With this technique the repeatability of the measurement of the individual coefficients was 0.019 µm. The standard deviation of the overall wave-height estimation across the pupil is less than 0.3 µm. Since this technique does not require the administration of pharmacological agents to dilate the pupil, we were able to measure the changes in the aberrations of the eye during accommodation. We found that administration of even a mild dilating agent causes a change in the aberration structure of the eye.