Abstract

Considerable attention in recent years has been directed towards the development of technology for the measurement of corneal topography. These developing techniques have significant applications in contact lens design and fitting, refractive manipulations of the cornea, and in the clinical and laboratory study of corneal diseases (Maguire and Bourne, 1989; McDonnell et al, 1989). There is a great deal of information contained in the typical representations of corneal data from commercial photokeratoscopes, and one of the more common presentation formats is a color coded map of corneal refractive power (Bogan et al, 1990; Maguire et al, 1987). This type of representation is useful, but quantitative representations of this information promise to enhance the utility of photokeratoscopy (Dingeldein et al, 1989). This paper describes a method for summarizing the information generated by photokeratoscopes. This method is particularly applicable to the description of astigmatism, and offers a new technique for conceptualizing and quantifying irregular astigmatism.

© 1992 Optical Society of America