Use of an optical system simulating behavior of human eye to generate retinal images and an image quality metric to evaluate same

A method of predicting clinical performance of an ophthalmic optical correction by imaging on an optical bench having an adaptive optics system comprising a deformable mirror and a wavefront sensor a series of objects of different sizes which include letters of different sizes by each of a plurality of eye optical systems, each of the eye optical systems including the ophthalmic optical correction, a model eye, and a model eye pupil, the method comprising:

• mounting the ophthalmic optical correction 500 in front of a model eye 510,
• adjusting a model eye pupil size 430 to represent an actual pupil size of a patient measuring the pupil size of the patient, recording an optical wavefront sans defocus,
• adjusting the deformable mirror 440 using the ocular wavefront sans defocus as an input 441 to represent the wavefront error of the patient eye,
• moving an object target 410 to beyond optical infinity and capturing an image 520 of the object target 410,
• moving the object target 410 to a vergence more positive by a known distance and capturing a second image 520 of the object target 410,
• continuing to move the object target 410 to a more positive vergence in steps by a known distance until a determined total vergence is reached while generating a series of letters having different letter sizes at each object target 410 distance,
• capturing an image 520 at all known distance step locations and all different letter sizes at each object target 410 distance,
• subjecting each captured image 520 at all known distance step locations to an algorithm to provide an output value representing a set of indicia of image quality of the optical design 500 at that vergence for the eye optical systems,
• comparing the output value at each vergence to a threshold to determine a just discernible object size for the given eye optical system at that vergence, and
• repeating the above method steps for any number of individual patients representing a predefined population sample.