Presbyopia compensation with a quartic axicon.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of quartic axicons for presbyopia compensation. The working principle relies on profiting the high depth of focus of the axicons to supplement the reduced accommodation amplitude of presbyopes.

METHODS

We present the design equations of a particular kind of axicon to compensate a general presbyopia condition using simultaneous vision. A rotationally symmetric polynomial of fourth-order, corresponding to the well-known Seidel spherical aberration term, was chosen as its refractive profile. To validate its performance, we computed the retinal images with Stiles-Crawford apodization for a presbyopic eye compensated with this quartic axicon and compared them with those obtained without compensation or with other available solutions based on the simultaneous vision principle.

RESULTS

The quartic axicon provides an important improvement of the image quality for intermediate distance vision in comparison with conventional bifocal and trifocal solutions. The image quality, however, is still not optimum for all distances.

CONCLUSIONS

The results show the usefulness of the proposed approach and point out the need for developing further adapted optimizations.