I would like to introduce the concept of the wave aberration to you and give you some information about why we think it is important and why it holds the key to the future of better laser refractive surgery. Let us start with the basics. Everyone knows about rays entering the eye. In a perfect eye, shown in figure 1, if you had parallel rays entering the eye from a star, the optics would bring these rays to a sharp point at the retina. That would be an ideal situation, but aberrated eyes have misshapen corneas and misshapen lenses and so the rays do not converge to a single point (Fig. 1). What does this have to do with wavefront? Wavefronts are really nothing more than surfaces that are perpendicular at every point to the rays I have just mentioned, as shown in figure 2.
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