Adaptive optics imaging with a pyramid wavefront sensor for visual science

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a cost-effective, non-modulated pyramid wavefront sensor for adaptive optics, enabling high-resolution in vivo retinal imaging and outperforming traditional Shack-Hartmann sensors in quality and versatility.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified, affordable pyramid wavefront sensor for adaptive optics and applies it successfully to human retinal imaging, showing improved image quality.

Findings

Successful in vivo retinal imaging in 5 subjects

Better image quality with P-WFS compared to SH-WFS

Versatile performance in various conditions

Abstract

The pyramid wavefront sensor (P-WFS) has replaced the Shack-Hartmann (SH-) WFS as sensor of choice for high performance adaptive optics (AO) systems in astronomy because of its flexibility in pupil sampling, its dynamic range, and its improved sensitivity in closed-loop application. Usually, a P-WFS requires modulation and high precision optics that lead to high complexity and costs of the sensor. These factors limit the competitiveness of the P-WFS with respect to other WFS devices for AO correction in visual science. Here, we present a cost effective realization of AO correction with a non-modulated PWFS and apply this technique to human retinal in vivo imaging using optical coherence tomography (OCT). P-WFS based high quality AO imaging was, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, successfully performed in 5 healthy subjects and benchmarked against the performance of conventional SH-WFS based AO. Smallest retinal cells such as central foveal cone photoreceptors are visualized and we observed a better quality of the images recorded with the P-WFS. The robustness and versatility of the sensor is demonstrated in the model eye under various conditions and in vivo by high-resolution imaging of other structures in the retina using standard and extended fields of view.