Progress on developing wavefront sensorless adaptive optics optical coherence tomography for in vivo retinal imaging in mice

We present a new design for a wavefront sensorless adaptive optics (WS-AO) Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) system for small animal retinal imaging in vivo. Without the optical complications necessary for inclusion of a wavefront sensor in the optical system, this version of WS-AO FD-OCT system has a simplified optical design, including elimination of long focal length scanning optics and optical conjugation of vertical and horizontal scanners. This modification provides a modular large Field of View for retinal screening (25 degree visual angle), while also allowing a “zoom” capability for allocating all the scanning resources to a smaller region of interest, allowing high resolution aberration-corrected imaging. In the present system we used a 0 Dpt contact lens to stabilize the mouse eye position and to allow long duration imaging. Defocus (axial focus position) in our system is controlled by the collimation of the OCT sample arm entrance beam.