Abstract

Recently, the chicken eye has become an important model for artificial myopia. A large body of data is available which describes morphological changes in the eyes of young chickens which occur in response to altered visual experience (mainly visual deprivation). Also, development of the refractive state has been studied extensively. However, no attempt has yet been published to predict changes in the refractive state from the changes in the ocular dimensions which were observed following experimental treatment. We used various techniques (infrared photoretinoscopy, infrared photokeratometry, A-scan ultrasound, frozen sections, transscleral images, refractometry, and nonparaxial ray tracing) to develop a schematic eye for the 30-day old chicken. Based on the schematic eye, the refractive state was calculated from morphological data in both normal and ametropic chickens and compared to the refractive states actually measured.

© 1987 Optical Society of America