title: Improving high resolution retinal image quality using speckle illumination HiLo imaging.
abstract: Retinal image quality from flood illumination adaptive optics (AO) ophthalmoscopes is adversely affected by out-of-focus light scatter due to the lack of confocality. This effect is more pronounced in small eyes, such as that of rodents, because the requisite high optical power confers a large dioptric thickness to the retina. A recently-developed structured illumination microscopy (SIM) technique called HiLo imaging has been shown to reduce the effect of out-of-focus light scatter in flood illumination microscopes and produce pseudo-confocal images with significantly improved image quality. In this work, we adopted the HiLo technique to a flood AO ophthalmoscope and performed AO imaging in both (physical) model and live rat eyes. The improvement in image quality from HiLo imaging is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively by using spatial spectral analysis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Xiaolin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Phillip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bedggood
authors.affiliation: Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Metha
keywords: (010.1080) Active or adaptive optics; (170.3880) Medical and biological imaging; (170.4460) Ophthalmic optics and devices; (330.4875) Optics of physiological systems