Abstract
Adaptive optics (AO) retinal image quality of rodent eyes is inferior to that of human eyes, despite the promise of greater numerical aperture. This paradox challenges several assumptions commonly made in AO imaging, assumptions which may be invalidated by the very high power and dioptric thickness of the rodent retina. We used optical modeling to compare the performance of rat and human eyes under conditions that tested the validity of these assumptions. Results showed that AO image quality in the human eye is robust to positioning errors of the AO corrector and to differences in imaging depth and wavelength compared to the wavefront beacon. In contrast, image quality in the rat eye declines sharply with each of these manipulations, especially when imaging off-axis. However, some latitude does exist to offset these manipulations against each other to produce good image quality.
Highlights
Rodents are commonly used in eye disease models such as glaucoma, diabetes and macular degeneration due to their low cost, ease of maintenance and handling, and rapid growth compared to primates [1,2,3,4,5]
Received 3 Apr 2012; revised 8 Jun 2012; accepted Jun 2012; published 3 Jul 2012 1 August 2012 / Vol 3, No 8 / BIOMEDICAL OPTICS EXPRESS 1812 has been used successfully in human eyes for the past years [12], and offers even greater potential in rodent eyes which have more than twice the numerical aperture when pupils are maximally dilated [13]
Because the retina is so thin relative to the refracting ocular components in the human eye, other induced aberrations are typically considered negligible. We explored this assumption by first determining the Adaptive optics (AO) correction for a wavefront beacon at the inner limiting membrane (ILM)
Summary
Rodents are commonly used in eye disease models such as glaucoma, diabetes and macular degeneration due to their low cost, ease of maintenance and handling, and rapid growth compared to primates [1,2,3,4,5]. Adaptive optics (AO) allows diffractionlimited imaging of the retina, which provides non-invasive visualization of disease models on the microscopic scale, and their evolution over time, in living eyes [10,11]. Several studies have attempted to image the rodent eye with AO, allowing visualization of the photoreceptor mosaic in reflectance and of ganglion cell features in fluorescence [13,14,15]. Despite the theoretically superior resolution in the rodent eye, published images have until recently suffered from significantly reduced contrast and resolution compared to the state of the art in primate and human eyes [10,11,16]
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