Towards wide-field high-resolution retinal imaging

TL;DR

This paper explores applying layer-oriented multi-conjugate adaptive optics to retinal imaging to overcome field size limitations of traditional adaptive optics, aiming for wider high-resolution retinal images without artifacts.

Contribution

It investigates the feasibility of layer-oriented MCAO for retinal imaging, potentially enabling larger corrected fields compared to star-oriented approaches.

Findings

Layer-oriented MCAO can potentially increase corrected image size.

Challenges in tomographic reconstruction limit larger field corrections.

The approach offers a promising alternative for wide-field high-resolution retinal imaging.

Abstract

Adaptive optical correction is an efficient technique to obtain high-resolution images of the retinal surface. A main limitation of adaptive optical correction, however, is the small size of the corrected image. For medical purposes it is important to increase the size of the corrected images. This can be done through composite imaging, but a major difficulty is then the introduction of reconstruction artifacts. Another approach is multi-conjugate adaptive optics. MCAO comes in two flavors. The star- oriented approach has been demonstrated on the eye and allows to increase the diameter of the corrected image by a factor of approximately 2-3. Difficulties in the tomographic reconstruction precludes the correction of larger fields. Here we have investigate the possibility to apply a layer-oriented MCAO approach to retinal imaging.