Abstract
We present wavefront sensorless adaptive optics (WSAO) Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) for in vivo small animal retinal imaging. WSAO is attractive especially for mouse retinal imaging because it simplifies optical design and eliminates the need for wavefront sensing, which is difficult in the small animal eye. GPU accelerated processing of the OCT data permitted real-time extraction of image quality metrics (intensity) for arbitrarily selected retinal layers to be optimized. Modal control of a commercially available segmented deformable mirror (IrisAO Inc.) provided rapid convergence using a sequential search algorithm. Image quality improvements with WSAO OCT are presented for both pigmented and albino mouse retinal data, acquired in vivo.
Highlights
Adaptive optics (AO) was originally developed to correct for the perturbations of star light passing through the atmosphere that affected the resolving power of large pupil diameter optical telescopes
Geng et al demonstrated the appearance of a double spot in the wavefront sensor (WFS) when the wavefront beacon with a long depth of focus was reflected from the mouse retina, in contrast to a single spot when focusing on a retinal vessel [12]
Instead of relying on wavefront aberration measurement from the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor as feedback to the AO loop, wavefront sensorless AO analyzes merit functions based on the image, iteratively searches for the optimal Zernike modes to apply to the deformable mirror (DM)
Summary
Adaptive optics (AO) was originally developed to correct for the perturbations of star light passing through the atmosphere that affected the resolving power of large pupil diameter optical telescopes. Wavefront sensing can suffer from non-common path errors, misalignment, detected spot centroiding and wavefront reconstruction errors, back-reflection from lens based systems, etc. These issues are exacerbated in small animal retinal imaging systems. Biss et al demonstrated that with AO correction of monochromatic aberrations, the brightness and resolution of the image can be increased in mouse retinal imaging with SLO [11]. They reported on the difficulties of wavefront sensing for mice, which may arise from the ‘small eye artifact’. The approach used in these reports on wavefront sensing is likely limited to pigmented mice, and would not likely perform as well in the presence of strong back reflection from the choroid in albino animals
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