High-performance adaptive optics system with long-term stability using liquid-crystal-on-silicon spatial light modulator for high-resolution retinal imaging

An adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AO-SLO) using a liquid-crystal spatial light modulator was developed. For routine clinical applications, long-term stability of the AO system is very important because unavoidable eye movement may degrade the instrument's performance. We studied the long-term performance of the aberration correction with healthy human eyes. Retinal image acquisition and AO data collection were performed simultaneously for periods of several minutes. We confirmed that, for more than 90% of the periods, the root-mean-square errors of residual wavefront were below the Marechal criterion. Drifts and microsaccades of fixational eye movement were examined using retinal images and residual aberrations. The results showed significant correlation between the transverse shift of retinal image and the low-order residual wavefront aberration during the drifts.