Emmetropic eyes: objective performance and clinical reference

Abstract

The application of the wavefront sensors to measuring the monochromatic aberrations of the normal human eyes has given a new insight in the objective understanding of its performance. The resultant wavefront aberration function can be applied to evaluate the image quality on the retina, which includes the analysis of the higher-order aberrations. Among others, and due to their well-known mathematical properties for circular apertures, the wavefront aberration function is most commonly represented in terms of the Zernike polynomials. The main idea is to have a clinical reference of the objective performance of a set of normal human eyes. However, the high-order aberrations in normal human eyes are different for each person¸ that can be interpreted as that there are many possible solutions for the objective performance of emmetropic eyes. When dealing with the Zernike coefficients and excluding the spherical aberration, higher-order aberrations have a tendency to have a zero mean value. Different proposals have been suggested in the literature to deal with this feature. Moreover, it has been also shown that there is an ethnic dependency in the magnitude of the aberrations. We present in this work the objective performance of a set of uncorrected Mexican eyes, and compare them with other ethnic results published in the literature.