Method for the generation and visualization of cross-sectional images of three-dimensional point spread functions for...

Cross-sectional images of three-dimensional point spread functions of intraocular lenses are used to study their image formation. To obtain those, light sheet-based methods are established. Due to the non-negligible thicknesses of the light sheets, the image quality of the cross-sectional images is constrained. To overcome this hurdle, we present a dedicated evaluation algorithm to increase image quality in the post-processing step. Additionally, we compare the developed- with the light sheet method based on our own investigations of a multifocal diffractive intraocular lens conducted in an in-house designed optical bench. The comparative study showed the clear superiority of the newly developed method in terms of image quality, fine structure visibility, and signal-to-noise ratio compared to the light sheet based method. However, since the algorithm assumes a rotationally symmetrical point spread function, it is only suitable for all rotationally symmetrical lenses.