Comparison of refractive power maps from a reference surface: geometric versus Zernike power polynomials

In recent years there has been many advances in the field of visual optics, such as new technologies to measure and to analyze the wavefront aberration function of the human eye. In this direction, corneal topographers have been extensively used as a tool to obtain related data that can be used to get the refractive power maps of the human cornea in order to characterize the optical function of the eye. On the other hand, it is well known that we can describe the optical aberrations in the human eye as a polynomial expansion of the Zernike polynomials. In this work we present a qualitative comparison of a refractive power map from a reference refractive surface obtained with an alternate form of representation, first proposed in 2007 by Iskander(1) et al., of the wavefront aberrations in the dioptric power domain and the usual geometrical representation of the power refractive maps. We present our preliminary results from such comparison.