Making sense out of wavefront sensing.

a T p HE PRESENCE OF OPTICAL ABERRATIONS THAT BLUR retinal images were the subject of popular lectures by Helmholtz in the 1860s, and led him to state: Now, it is not too much to say that if an optician wanted o sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I hould think myself justified in blaming his carelessness in he strongest terms and giving him back his instrument.”1 ecently, the availability of wavefront aberrometers in the linical setting and wavefront-guided vision correction has ekindled an intense interest in the optical aberrations of he eye and in particular those aberrations that cannot be orrected with traditional sphero-cylindrical lenses. In this Perspective, we will review the concept of optical berration (wavefront error) of the eye, factors influencing etinal image quality, factors contributing to the visual ercept, and evaluation of visual performance. We provide his review to set a common stage on which to examine a eries of questions. It is our hope that the responses to these questions will acilitate the application of wavefront sensing to: (1) truly ustomize wavefront guided corrections to a patient’s eeds; and (2) understand the factors influencing visual erformance and the measurement of visual performance n the age of wavefront guided corrections.