Average biometry of the cornea in a large population of Iranian school children

This work establishes the average Scheimpflug corneal tomography for a population of 4953 healthy Iranian primary school children. These data were transformed to determine the corneal position and orientation in three-dimensional space, followed by a model fit that combines a biconic with a Zernike expansion. Girls were found to have slightly steeper corneas than boys. Both corneal surfaces show negative conic constants and significant higher-order aspheric Zernike terms. The corneal surfaces are decentered and misaligned with respect to each other and to the line of sight. Consequently, the average corneal surfaces may be considered as decentered and misaligned higher-order aspheres.