Resumen: This work presents a compact statistical model of the retinal image quality in a large population of human eyes following two objectives. The first was to develop a general modal representation of the optical transfer function (OTF) in terms of orthogonal functions and construct a basis composed of cross-correlations between pairs of complex Zernike polynomials. That basis was not orthogonal and highly redundant, requiring the application of singular value decomposition (SVD) to obtain an orthogonal basis with a significantly lower dimensionality. The first mode is the OTF of the perfect system, and hence the modal representation, is highly compact for well-corrected optical systems, and vice-versa. The second objective is to apply this modal representation to the OTFs of a large population of human eyes for a pupil diameter of 5 mm. This permits an initial strong data compression. Next, principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to obtain further data compression, leading to a compact statistical model of the initial population. In this model each OTF is approximated by the sum of the population mean plus a linear combination of orthogonal eigenfunctions (eigen-OTF) accounting for a selected percentage (90%) of the population variance. This type of models can be useful for Monte Carlo simulations among other applications Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.1364/BOE.10.005818 Año: 2019 Publicado en: Biomedical Optics Express 10, 11 (2019), 5818-5831 ISSN: 2156-7085 Factor impacto JCR: 3.921 (2019) Categ. JCR: BIOCHEMICAL RESEARCH METHODS rank: 15 / 77 = 0.195 (2019) - Q1 - T1 Categ. JCR: RADIOLOGY, NUCLEAR MEDICINE & MEDICAL IMAGING rank: 24 / 133 = 0.18 (2019) - Q1 - T1 Categ. JCR: OPTICS rank: 17 / 97 = 0.175 (2019) - Q1 - T1 Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 1.591 - Biotechnology (Q1) - Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics (Q1)