US 6,199,986 B1 · Rapid, automatic measurement of the eye's wave aberration

Abstract

A wavefront aberration of an eye is determined, e.g., in real time. The eye is illuminated, and the light reflected from the retina is converted into spots with a device such as a Hartmann-Shack detector. The displacement of each spot from where it would be in the absence of aberration allows calculation of the aberration. Each spot is located by an iterative technique in which a corresponding centroid is located in a box drawn on the image data, a smaller box is defined around the centroid, the centroid is located in the smaller box, and so on. The wavefront aberration is calculated from the centroid locations by using a matrix in which unusable data can be eliminated simply by eliminating rows of the matrix. Aberrations for different pupil sizes are handled in data taken for a single pupil size by renormalization.

Claims62

Dependent claims

A method of measuring a wavefront aberration of an eye, the method comprising:

(a) taking image data from the eye, the image data comprising a plurality of spots having positions determined by the wavefront aberration;
(b) defining a plurality of search boxes in the image data;
(c) determining the positions of the spots by
(i) locating a centroid in each of the search boxes;
(ii) replacing each of the search boxes with a search box of reduced size;
(iii) locating the centroid in each of the search boxes of reduced size;
and
(iv) repeating steps (ii) and (iii) until each of the search boxes of reduced size reaches a minimum size;
and
(d) calculating the wavefront aberration in accordance with the positions of the spots.

7 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Rapid, automatic measurement of the eye's wave aberration

Life of this patent

Rapid, automatic measurement of the eye's wave aberration

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims62