Determining the accommodative response from wavefront aberrations.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate some of the methods used to calculate objective refractions from wavefront aberrations, to determine their applicability for accommodation research. A wavefront analyzer was used to measure the ocular aberrations of 13 emmetropes and 17 myopes at distance, and 4 near target vergences: 2, 3, 4, and 5 D. The accommodative response was calculated using the following techniques: least squares fitting (Zernike defocus), paraxial curvature matching (Seidel defocus), and 5 optical quality metrics (PFWc, PFSc, PFCc, NS, and VSMTF). We also evaluated a task-specific method of determining optimum focus that used a through-focus procedure to select the image that best optimized both contrast amplitude and gradient (CAG). Neither Zernike nor Seidel defocus appears to be the best method for determining the accommodative response from wavefront aberrations. When the eye has negative spherical aberration, Zernike defocus tends to underestimate, whereas Seidel defocus tends to overestimate the accommodative response. A better approach is to first determine the best image plane using a suitable optical quality metric and then calculate the accommodative error relative to this plane. Of the metrics evaluated, both NS and VSMTF were reasonable choices, with the CAG algorithm being a less preferred alternate.