Improving wavefront boundary condition for in vivo high resolution adaptive optics ophthalmic imaging

An ophthalmic adaptive optics (AO) imaging system is especially affected by pupil edge effects due to the higher noise and aberration level at the edge of the human pupil as well as the impact of head and eye motions on the pupil. In this paper, a two-step approach was proposed and implemented for reducing the edge effects and improving wavefront slope boundary condition. First, given an imaging pupil, a smaller size of sampling aperture can be adopted to avoid the noisy boundary slope data. To do this, we calibrated a set of influence matrices for different aperture sizes to accommodate pupil variations within the population. In step two, the slope data was extrapolated from the less noisy slope data inside the pupil towards the outside such that we had reasonable slope data over a larger aperture to stabilize the impact of eye pupil dynamics. This technique is applicable to any Neumann boundary-based active /adaptive modality but it is especially useful in the eye for improving AO retinal image quality where the boundary positions fluctuate. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America