Abstract
Optical coherence tomography equipped with adaptive optics (AO-OCT) has been pursued for more than a decade and a half for imaging the microscopic retina in the living human eye. Over this period, AO-OCT has experienced tremendous advances in imaging performance – most notably micron-level resolution in all three dimensions – and has been successfully used in numerous scientific and clinical studies. However, much of the cellular retina remains difficult to visualize with AO-OCT. Two key obstacles has been intrinsic speckle noise that limits image contrast and slow image acquisition speed that exposes the method to eye motion artifacts. Here we present our solutions to these problems and the resulting capability to image cellular structures across the full thickness of the retina, including numerous classes of transparent neurons. These advances in OCT technology and image processing poise the method for a major role in clinical applications.