Wavefront Sensorless and Computational Adaptive Optics for High Resolution Imaging

本研究提案的目的是研究新型光学技术，以推进人类细胞分辨率眼科成像的最新技术水平。具体而言，将通过以下两个目标研究基于波前传感器的自适应光学技术用于眼科OCT成像： 目的1：用于细胞分辨率视网膜成像的闭环波前无传感器自适应光学（WSAO）OCT： WSAO OCT通过直接使用图像质量度量作为像差校正的评价函数，克服了与传统波前传感器相关联的问题。尽管WSAO在临床前和临床成像方面都取得了成功，但它受到算法执行波前校正所需时间的限制，并且不能解释波前像差的时间变化。本文将研究WSAO优化算法中的新方法，以减少优化时间，从而执行闭环像差校正。 目的2：平行波前无传感器自适应光学辅助宽视场视网膜成像： AO视网膜成像有限的视野阻碍了其在临床环境中的广泛应用。AO提供的精细空间分辨率对于临床应用是有用的，然而，许多视网膜疾病的诊断依赖于视网膜的大视场成像。将研究新的并行WSAO像差校正，以应用由光学建模和在不同视网膜偏心率下同时并行WSAO优化的组合确定的不同像差校正曲线。 我的生物光子学研究计划的潜在影响是改善临床眼科诊断的成像技术，并创造新的工具来加速视觉研究，以临床前开发视觉掠夺疾病的实验疗法。

The purpose of this research proposal is to investigate novel optical techniques to advance the state of the art for cellular resolution ophthalmic imaging in humans. Specifically, wavefront sensorless adaptive optics based techniques will be investigated for ophthalmic OCT imaging through the following two objectives: Objective 1: Closed-loop wavefront sensorless adaptive optics (WSAO) OCT for cellular resolution retinal imaging: WSAO OCT overcomes the issues associated with conventional wavefront sensor, by directly using the image quality metric as a merit function for aberration correction. Despite its success in both preclinical and clinical imaging, WSAO is limited by time needed for the algorithm to perform the wavefront correction, and cannot account for temporal changes of the wavefront aberrations. Novel methods in WSAO optimization algorithm will be investigated to decrease the optimization time in order to perform closed-loop aberration correction. Objective 2: Parallel wavefront sensorless adaptive optics assisted wide field of view retinal imaging: AO retinal imaging’s limited field of view is preventing its widespread adaptation in clinical environment. It has been well established that the exquisite spatial resolution afforded by AO is useful for clinical application, however, the diagnosis of many retinal diseases depend upon large field imaging of the retina. Novel parallel WSAO aberration correction will be investigated to apply different aberration correction profiles determined by the combination of optical modeling and simultaneous parallel WSAO optimization at different retinal eccentricities. The potential impact of my research program in Biophotonics is to improve imaging technology for clinical ophthalmic diagnosis, and to create novel tools to accelerate vision research in the preclinical development of experimental therapies for vision robbing diseases.