Despite this demonstrated need, a methodology for completely and noninvasively characterizing the 3-D shape of the whole human eye is not currently available. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers the possibility of such a technique, but to date, there have been relatively few studies in which MRI was used to study ocular shape in three dimensions. In a mixed population (
n = 15) of myopes, emmetropes, and hyperopes, Chen et al.
22 manually delineated the boundaries of the posterior chamber on a single 3-mm-thick axial slice through the center of the eye, enabling them to quantify shape parameters such as radius and deviations from sphericity on this 2-D plane. Similarly, in a small study, Cheng et al.
23 acquired MRI images as slices in three dimensions. Using three orthogonal 3-mm-thick slices, they characterized the shape of hyperopic and myopic eyes by measuring the three principal dimensions of the eye (anterior-posterior, equatorial and superior-inferior). Chau et al.
24 used MRI to demonstrate that there was no relationship between ocular and orbit volumes in a population varying from hyperopia to high myopia. Although the volume of the eye was quantified from 3-D MRI data, no attempt was made to characterize the shape of the eye itself. In a recent larger, MRI study (
n = 88) of myopia, Atchison et al.
25 measured the three linear dimensions of each eye by careful placement of single, 3-mm-thick, slices in each of the axial and sagittal planes. In a more recent study of the same data,
26 3-D ellipsoids were fitted to the retinal surface identified on two-dimensional (2-D) axial and sagittal image sections. Because of the signal-to-noise limitations, none of these studies has reconstructed the complete 3-D structure of the eye from MRI data that have a high resolution in all three dimensions. Rather, they have inferred the 3-D shape of the eye from a very limited number of 2-D sections through the eye.