In brief, an AO system employs a wavefront sensor to measure the eye’s aberrations and a wavefront corrector to compensate for them. The system employed a conventional imaging modality, using a flash lamp to illuminate the retina and a science grade CCD camera to record the image.Įxtensive descriptions can be found in the literature on how an AO system works in general 6, or specifically for vision applications 7, 8. In 1996, David Williams at the University of Rochester assembled a team including Junzhong Liang and Donald Miller (PhD student at the time), who built the first AO ophthalmoscope, capable of correcting higher order aberrations 5. With such a device, which could measure the eye’s aberrations quickly and accurately, all the pieces were finally in place. demonstrated for the first time a Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor for the eye 4. A short time later, out of the same lab, Liang et al. As such, the concept was laid out, but the improvements in image quality were modest. At that time a key component of an AO system, the wavefront sensor, was not used, and the AO system was capable only of correcting defocus and astigmatism. The first attempt to use AO in an SLO was made by Dreher and colleagues in 1989 3. Furthermore, users of AOSLO continue to appreciate the benefits of the technology, some of which were not anticipated at the time of development, and so it is time to revisit this topic and summarize them in a single paper. Since the Borish award was, in part, awarded to me because of this effort, I felt it appropriate to select this as the topic for this paper. In this paper, I discuss the applications and advantages of using AO in a specific system, the adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope, or AOSLO. In fact, AO can be integrated to any ophthalmic instrument where the optics of the eye is involved, with a scope of applications ranging from phoropters to optical coherence tomography systems. AO systems have been demonstrated for advanced ophthalmoscopy as well as for testing and/or improving vision.

If used to correct aberrations over a large pupil, for example, cellular level resolution in retinal images can be achieved. In the eye, AO allows for precise control of the ocular aberrations.

Adaptive optics (AO) describes a set of tools to correct or control aberrations in any optical system.

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