AO-OCT for in vivo mouse retinal imaging: Application of adaptive lens in wavefront sensorless aberration correction

We demonstrate Adaptive optics - Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) with modal sensorless Adaptive Optics correction with the use of novel Adaptive Lens (AL) applied for in-vivo imaging of mouse retinas. The AL can generate low order aberrations: defocus, astigmatism, coma and spherical aberration that were used in an adaptive search algorithm. Accelerated processing of the OCT data with a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) permitted real time extraction of image projection total intensity for arbitrarily selected retinal depth plane to be optimized. Wavefront sensorless control is a viable option for imaging biological structures for which AO-OCT cannot establish a reliable wavefront that could be corrected by wavefront corrector. Image quality improvements offered by adaptive lens with sensorless AO-OCT was evaluated on in vitro samples followed by mouse retina data acquired in vivo.