Modeling refractive correction strategies in keratoconus

This work intends to determine the optimal refractive spectacle and scleral lens corrections for keratoconus patients using the visual Strehl (VSX) visual image quality metric and the SyntEyes models with the synthetic biometry of 20 normal eyes and 20 keratoconic eyes. These included the corneal tomography and intraocular biometry. A series of virtual spherocylindrical spectacle and scleral lens corrections spanning the entire phoropter range were separately applied to each eye, followed by ray tracing to determine the residual wavefront aberrations and identify the correction with the highest possible VSX (named a “focus”). To speed up calculations, a smart scanning algorithm was used, consisting of three consecutive scans over increasingly finer dioptric grids. In the dioptric space, the VSX pattern for normal eyes considered over the correction range for either spectacle or scleral lens corrections resembled an hourglass with one distinct focus and a quick drop in VSX away from that focus. For 18 of the 20 keratoconic eyes, the spectacle-corrected VSX pattern resembled a shell that in 9 of the 20 cases showed two foci separated by a large dioptric distance (13.3 ± 4.9 diopters). In keratoconic eyes, scleral lenses also produced hourglass patterns, but with a VSX lower than in normal eyes. The hourglass pattern in dioptric space shows how, in normal eyes, the refracting process automatically funnels practitioners toward the optimal correction. The shell patterns in keratoconus, however, present far more complexity and, possibly, multiple foci. Depending on the starting point, refracting procedures may lead to a local maximum rather than the optimal correction.