Peripheral overall blur is mostly influenced by the interaction of defocus and oblique astigmatism, and at larger eccentricities is similar for the different refractive groups. This could argue against the hypothesis that a relative peripheral hyperopia could drive eyes toward myopia.

Eye models are valuable tools that can help delineate the role of anatomical parameters on visual performance and guide the design of advanced ophthalmic instrumentation. We propose an optically accurate wide-field schematic eye that reproduces the complete aberration profile of the human eye across a wide visual field. The optical performance of the schematic eye is based on experimentally measured wavefront aberrations taken with a four mm pupil for the central 80°of the horizontal meridian (101 eyes) and 50°of the vertical meridian (10 eyes). Across the entire field of view, our model shows excellent agreement with the measured data both comprehensively and for low-order and high-order aberrations. In comparison to previous eye models, our schematic eye excels at reproducing the aberrations of the retinal periphery. Also unlike previous models, tilt and decentering of the gradient refractive index crystalline lens, which arose naturally through the optimization process, permits our model to mimic the asymmetries of real human eyes while remaining both anatomically and optically correct. Finally, we outline a robust reverse building eye modeling technique that is capable of predicting trends beyond those defined explicitly in the optimization routine. Our proposed model may aid in the design of wide-field imaging instrumentation, including optical coherence tomography, scanning laser ophthalmoscopy, fluorescence imaging, and fundus photography, and it has the potential to provide further insights in the study and understanding of the peripheral optics of the human eye.

We designed and built a fast scanning peripheral Hartmann-Shack (HS) wave-front sensor to measure the off-axis wave-front aberrations in the human eye. The new instrument is capable of measuring the optical quality over the central 80° horizontal visual field in 1.8 seconds with an angular resolution of 1°. The subject has an open field of view without any moving elements in the line-of-sight and the head is kept in place by a head-chin rest. The same efficiency, reliability and measurement quality as the current static HS sensor were found but with much higher acquisition speed and comfort for the patients. This instrument has the potential to facilitate and improve future research on the peripheral optical quality of the eye in large groups of subjects.

The proposed methodology showed that the tested multifocal soft contact lenses gave a very small peripheral myopic shift in these four subjects and that they would need a larger optical zone and a more controlled depth of field to explain a possible treatment effect on myopia progression.

The interest in the eye's off-axis aberrations has increased strongly. On-axis the conversion of the aberration magnitude between different wavelengths is well known. We verified if this compensation is correct also for off-axis measurements by building a wavelength tunable peripheral Hartmann-Shack sensor and measuring 11 subjects out to AE30°in the horizontal visual field. At the fovea, an average longitudinal chromatic aberration of 1 D between red (671 nm) and blue (473 nm) light was found, and it increased slightly with eccentricity (up to 1:2 D). A similar trend was measured for astigmatism as a function of wavelength (increase ∼0:15 D). Computational ray tracing in model eyes showed that the origin of the small increase of chromatic aberrations with eccentricity is the change of the oblique power of the refractive surfaces in the eye. Factors related to increase of axial length and refractive index of the eye were found to have a very small influence.

Eyes implanted with monofocal IOLs present more astigmatism in the periphery than the healthy older eyes. This suggests that the crystalline lens provides a beneficial effect to partially compensate off-axis astigmatism. The degradation of the peripheral retinal image may reduce the pseudophakic patient's performance in common visual tasks.

A mirror symmetry in the aberrations between the left and right eyes has previously been found foveally, but while a similar symmetry for the peripheral visual field is likely, it has not been investigated. Nevertheless, the peripheral optical quality is often evaluated in only one eye, because it is more time efficient than analyzing the whole visual field of both eyes. This study investigates the correctness of such an approach by measuring the peripheral wavefront aberrations in both eyes of 22 subjects out to AE40horizontally. The largest aberrations (defocus, astigmatism, and coma) were found to be significantly correlated between the left and right eyes when comparing the same temporal or nasal angle. The slope of the regression line was close to AE1 (within 0.05) for these aberrations, with a negative slope for the horizontally odd aberrations, i.e. the left and right eyes are mirror symmetric. These findings justify that the average result, sampled in one of the two eyes of many subjects, can be generalized to the other eye as well.

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