Laser Ray Tracing versus Hartmann–Shack sensor for measuring optical aberrations in the human eye

A comparison and validation study of Laser Ray Tracing (LRT) and Hartmann-Shack wave-front-sensor (to be referred to as H-S) methods was carried out on both artificial and human eyes. The aim of this work was double. First, we wanted to verify experimentally the equivalence of single- and double-pass measurements for both H-S and LRT. This interest is due to the impossibility of making single-pass measurements in human eyes. In addition, we wanted to validate the LRT technique by comparing it with the H-S wave-front sensor, currently used in many physiological optics laboratories. Comparison of the different methods and configurations carried out in the artificial eye yielded basically the same results in all cases, which means a reciprocal validation of both LRT and H-S, in either single- or double-pass configurations. Other aspects, such as robustness against speckle noise or the influence of the size of the entrance (H-S) or exit (LRT) pupil were studied as well. As a global reference, the point-spread function (PSF) of the artificial eye was recorded directly on a CCD camera and compared with simulated PSF's computed from the experimental aberration data. We also applied these two methods to real eyes (double pass), finding again a close match between the resulting aberration coefficients and also between the standard errors for two normal subjects. However, for one myopic eye with an especially low optical quality (RMS wave-front error >2 microm) and asymmetric aberrations, the array of spots recorded with the H-S sensor was highly distorted and too difficult to analyze.