Zernike expansion coefficients: rescaling and decentering for different pupils and evaluation of corneal aberrations

SILVIA A COMASTRI; LILIANA I PEREZ; GERVASIO D PEREZ; GABRIEL MARTIN; KARINA BASTIDA

JOURNAL OF OPTICS. A, PURE AND APPLIED OPTICS (PRINT)

IOP Publishing

Año: 2007 vol. 9 p. 209 - 221

1464-4258

An analytical method to convert the set of Zernike coefficients that fits the wavefront aberration for a pupil into another corresponding to a contracted and horizontally translated pupil is proposed. The underlying selection rules are provided and the resulting conversion formulae for a seventh-order expansion are given. These formulae are applied to calculate corneal aberrations referred to a given pupil centre in terms of those referred to the keratometric vertex supplied by the SN CT1000 topographer. Four typical cases are considered: a sphere and three eyes—normal, keratoconic and post-LASIK. When the pupil centre is fixed and the pupil diameter decreases from 6 mm to the photopic natural one, leaving aside piston, tilt and defocus, the difference between the root mean square wavefront error computed with the formulae and the topographer is less than 0.04 μm. When the pupil diameter is kept equal to the natural one and the pupil centre is displaced, coefficients vary according to the eye. For a 0.3 mm pupil shift, the variation of coma is at most 0.35 μm and that of spherical aberration 0.01 μm.