Retinal imaging with adaptive optics

Imaging the human retina in vivo is affected by the eye's natural aberrations, which limit the resolution of retinal images. Measuring these aberrations, including the high order ones, is possible using wavefront sensing techniques. A review of the rapid progress in this field is given. Once the aberrations are known, adaptive optics methods, developed for astronomical observing in the past 15 years, can be applied. in order either to improve retinal imaging or to give hyper-vision to the subject. Progress in this domain is reviewed, and some original results are reported with a new instrument. Future applications are discussed, including a possible three-dimensional, hi,gh-resolution method to image the human retina in vivo. (C) 2001 Academie des sciences/Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS.