Piggyback intraocular lens that improves overall vision where there is a local loss of retinal function

Abstract

Systems and methods are provided for improving overall vision in patients suffering from a loss of vision in a portion of the retina (e.g., loss of central vision) by providing a piggyback lens which in combination with the cornea and an existing lens in the patient's eye redirects and/or focuses light incident on the eye at oblique angles onto a peripheral retinal location. The piggyback lens can include a redirection element (e.g., a prism, a diffractive element, or an optical component with a decentered GRIN profile) configured to direct incident light along a deflected optical axis and to focus an image at a location on the peripheral retina. Optical properties of the piggyback lens can be configured to improve or reduce peripheral errors at the location on the peripheral retina. One or more surfaces of the piggyback lens can be a toric surface, a higher order aspheric surface, an aspheric Zernike surface or a Biconic Zernike surface to reduce optical errors in an image produced at a peripheral retinal location by light incident at oblique angles.