Experimental and modeling analysis of lenses with concentric cylindrical annular refractive elements: impact on peripheral imaging

The mechanism by which myopia-managing spectacle lenses slow myopia progression remains controversial. Understanding the changes these lenses introduce to peripheral imaging properties helps shed light on this controversial issue. Given the difficulty of directly measuring these changes in clinical settings, this study combined experimental and modeling approaches to evaluate changes in images at the retina induced by myopia-managing lenses. Optical characteristics that may related to the efficacy of the lenses with concentric cylindrical annular refractive elements (CARE) in myopia control were investigated. Three lenses were evaluated: MyoCare (MC), MyoCare S (MCS), and a single vision (SV) lens with a custom-built physical eye model and optical simulations for the analysis. The simulated PSFs are consistent with the measured ones. PSF analysis showed that MC and MCS lenses produce discrete curves, resulting in remarkable distortion in the simulated retina images, especially for large eccentricities. Whether they increase or decrease contrast depends on the spatial frequencies and eccentricities. These lenses also increase retinal light intensity at different eccentricities. The positive power of the CARE structure introduces myopic defocus of less than 0.25 D at only a limited range of eccentricities. The proposed approaches present relatively straightforward techniques for evaluating the optical performance of myopia-managing spectacle lenses.