Spectral imaging of the retina

Spectral imaging of the retina shows great promise for the early detection of retinal disease through retinal screening programs. Implementation of such a program will require instrumentation capable of efficiently recording the requisite spectral data cube. We report on the development of two candidate approaches: one employs a traditional liquid crystal tunable filter to filter the illumination source and enable the spectral data cube to be assembled from mutually coregistered narrow-band images recorded in time sequence: the second employs, IRIS, a novel image replicating imaging spectrometer to record a two-dimensional spectral data cube in a single snapshot.