Comparison between two different methods to obtain the wavefront aberration function

The analysis and measurement of the wavefront aberration function are very important tools that allow us to evaluate the performance of any specified optical system. This technology has been adopted in visual optics for the analysis of optical aberrations in the human eye, before and after being subjected to laser refractive surgery. We have been working in the characterization and evaluation of the objective performance of human eyes that have been subjected to two different surface ablation techniques known as ASA and PASA1. However, optical aberrations in the human eye are time-dependent2 and, hence, difficult to analyze. In order to obtain a static profile from the post-operatory wavefront aberration function we applied these ablation techniques directly over hard contact lenses. In this work we show the comparison between two different methods to obtain the wavefront aberration function from a reference refractive surface, in order to generalize this method and being able to fully characterize hard contact lenses which have been subjected to different ablation techniques typically used in refractive surgery for vision correction. For the first method we used a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, and in the second method we used a Mach-Zehnder type interferometer. We show the preliminary results of this characterization.