A method to describe corneal topography.

Most commercially available corneal topographers produce color-coded maps of the cornea. Although these maps are clinically useful, more precise quantitative methods for the analysis of corneal topographic data are needed. The purpose of this work is to apply a method, known as an expansion in a complete set of functions, to this problem. This method leads to a set of parameters which are a direct extension of the common clinical method of describing corneal topography in terms of the corneal sphere power, cylinder power, and cylinder axis. To illustrate this approach, data were gathered on three subjects with the TMS corneal topographer and the parameters were estimated using linear regression procedures.