The human eye research team of Adaptive Optical Key Laboratory, Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made progress in research on the objective evaluation of intraocular forward scattering: the adaptive optics technology has been applied to the objective evaluation of intraocular forward scattering for the first time, and the adaptive optical double pass point spread function (Point Spread Function, PSF) measurement and objective evaluation of human eye scattering has been built and designed, which solves the restrictions of the existing technology due to the human eye higher-order aberration, improves the accuracy of the intraocular forward scattering objective evaluation. This technology is of great significance in the clinical application.The technology which is based on the double pass PSE to evaluate the intraocular forward scattering has been applied to the classification of the cataract, the diagnosis of xeroma as well as the quality evaluation of the intraocular lens. This technology is aimed to evacuate the intraocular forward scattering of the eye through the human eye dual pass PSF images, and the measurement results are affected by the high order aberrations of the human eye. In order to reduce the influence of high order aberrations of human eyes on the measurement accuracy, the existing system based on double pass PSF which evaluates the human eye scattering is a small aperture structure. However, the small aperture structure shall be adopted. When the scattering source is not in the measurement optical path, it will seriously affect the results of intraocular scattering measurements.  

The research team has put forward the technical proposal integrating the large aperture structure with the adaptive optics for the issues such as human eye high order aberration and the impacts of small aperture on the measurement accuracy of human eye scattering. At the same time, the scheme solves the problems with the measurement results arising from high order aberration of human eyes and small aperture structure. According to the above scheme, the adaptive optical double pass PSF measurement and the objective evaluation system of the intraocular forward scattering has been designed and built. The research results show that the accuracy of the intraocular forward scattering has been increased by 2 times by adopting this technology, compared with the existing low order aberration correction small aperture method. 

This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.  

Schematic diagram of system architecture  

Related findings were published in the recent Biomedical Optics Express.