Clinical applications of wavefront aberrometry - a review.

One of the most powerful clinical applications of aberrometry is wavefront-guided refractive surgery. This concept led to a paradigm shift in refractive error correction, and the same ideas were applied to design the power and shape of intraocular and contact lenses. Other applications are the diagnosis of irregular astigmatism and the assessments of the optical quality of the eye. Because the higher-order aberrations of the eye are expressed as the total root mean square errors, a set of coefficients for the Zernike terms, Strehl ratio, point spread functions, modulation transfer functions, and other types of metrics can be determined, hence the deterioration in the quality of vision can be easily estimated. Simulations of the retinal images are also useful to understand some of the symptoms in patients with irregular astigmatism. With corneal topographic analyses, the origin of irregular astigmatism from the cornea or internally, or both, can be specified by aberrometry.