Spectral resolved confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscopy based on supercontinuum

• Main Authors: Yueh-Hung Cheng, 鄭岳弘
• Other Authors: Shi-Wei Chu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54971141041208482115

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 應用物理所 === 99 === Retina is a fragile layered tissue composed of neurons responsible for color vision. It is not only part of central nervous system (CNS) which can be investigate noninvasively, but also the only window that microscopic inspection of circulation system can be taken without invasion. A confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope (cSLO) provides three-dimensional structure of retina, which is important to retinopathy diagnosis. As diseases usually occur with biomedical change of tissue, a spectrally resolved cSLO can diagnose the illness in the early stages by analyzing absorption spectrum of the tissue. Furthermore, because the neurons on retina are sensitive to the wavelength of the light exposed to, a spectrally resolved cSLO facilitates the studies of the neuroscience about retina. There have been several attempts of spectrally resolved cSLO, but the performances of those systems were all limited by the bandwidth of the lasers and the chromatic/geometric aberration of optics. Here a spectrally resolved cSLO with bandwidth from visible to infrared is demonstrated. The broadband light source is a supercontinuum laser, which is generated from the nonlinear effects in a photonic crystal fiber. We also construct a mirror-based scanning system with diffraction-limited performance, overcoming the aberration problems in previous multispectral systems. With this system, spectral images of living retina from visible to infrared are acquired in a noninvasive manner. Resolution is around 3µm in living zebrafish, which is adequate for cone cell recognition and researches about retina, vision and neuroscience.