Adaptive optics in the mouse eye: wavefront sensing based vs. image-guided aberration correction.

Daniel J Wahl,Martino Quintavalla,Riccardo Muradore,Jacopo Mocci,Marinko V Sarunic,Yifan Jian,Robert J Zawadzki,Pengfei Zhang,Stefano Bonora

doi:10.1364/boe.10.004757

Abstract

Adaptive Optics (AO) is required to achieve diffraction limited resolution in many real-life imaging applications in biology and medicine. AO is essential to guarantee high fidelity visualization of cellular structures for retinal imaging by correcting ocular aberrations. Aberration correction for mouse retinal imaging by direct wavefront measurement has been demonstrated with great success. However, for mouse eyes, the performance of the wavefront sensor (WFS) based AO can be limited by several factors including non-common path errors, wavefront reconstruction errors, and an ill-defined reference plane. Image-based AO can avoid these issues at the cost of algorithmic execution time. Furthermore, image-based approaches can provide improvements to compactness, accessibility, and even the performance of AO systems. Here, we demonstrate the ability of image-based AO to provide comparable aberration correction and image resolution to the conventional Shack-Hartmann WFS-based AO approach. The residual wavefront error of the mouse eye was monitored during a wavefront sensorless optimization to allow comparison with classical AO. This also allowed us to improve the performance of our AO system for small animal retinal imaging.

Highlights

Retinal imaging with Adaptive Optics (AO) is necessary to allow reliable visualization and monitoring of single retinal cell morphology in vivo by correcting for ocular aberrations of the eye, which acts as the microscope objective
We demonstrate wavefront sensor (WFS)-less AO for aberration correction that was implemented in a state-of-the-art WFS AO SLO system design for mouse retinal imaging, and present comparisons of the image quality and wavefront measurements during AO correction performed by each method
The image quality metric after WFS-less AO was 16% better than the image produced by the WFS-based AO

Summary

Introduction

Retinal imaging with Adaptive Optics (AO) is necessary to allow reliable visualization and monitoring of single retinal cell morphology in vivo by correcting for ocular aberrations of the eye, which acts as the microscope objective. Conventional ex vivo immunohistochemistry often used in these studies provides exquisite cellular contrast and high cellular resolution of the retina, but only at a single point in time This results in studies with large cohorts of animals multiplied by the number of time points that are needed. Mouse models are widely used in preclinical research partially due to the availability of transgenic strains, which includes mice with the relevant cell classes labeled by fluorescent proteins. Imaging modalities such as Adaptive Optics - Scanning Light Ophthalmoscopy (AO-SLO) employed with fluorescence detection can be used to examine the structural and functional features [2,3] in the retina at cellular resolution. A recent review article [4] further describes the significance of AO for retinal imaging in vision science

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