High-resolution human retinal imaging using full-field OCT with optical stabilization of axial motion.

Time-domain full-field OCT (FF-OCT) represents an imaging modality capable of recording high-speed sections of a sample at a given depth. One of the biggest challenges to transfer this technique to image human retina is the presence of continuous involuntary head and eye axial motion during image acquisition. In this paper, we demonstrate a solution to this problem by implementing an optical stabilization in an FF-OCT system. This was made possible by combining an FF-OCT system, an SD-OCT system, and a high-speed voice-coil translation stage. B-scans generated by the SD-OCT were used to measure the retina axial position and to drive the position of the high-speed voice coil translation stage, where the FF-OCT reference arm is mounted. Closed-loop optical stabilization reduced the RMS error by a factor of 7, significantly increasing the FF-OCT image acquisition efficiency. By these means, we demonstrate the capacity of the FF-OCT to resolve cone mosaic as close as 1.5 from the fovea center with high consistency and without using adaptive optics.