Advances in biomedical microscopy in living tissue are being applied to ophthalmology and will lead to improvements in diagnosis and treatment. The device has been commercialized and is being used to image cells in the fundus at the rear of the eye, detecting subtle changes between healthy and diseased eyes. As well as optical slicing in depth, improved contrast is possible because of the scanning of the incident beam and by use of a confocal aperture. This allows imaging through the cloudy media often present in older eyes. In essence, small pupil sizes result in larger spot sizes due to light diffraction by the pupil.
Large pupils result in imperfect optics and the spot size is increased by ocular aberrations.
Thus, improving the resolution of CLSO systems to improve the resolution of fundus imaging is a major research thrust. Connections With funding from PRO and other research funding agencies, Dr. Melanie Campbell and her team at the University of Waterloo are focused on understanding the optical quality of the retina of the eye, and using that knowledge to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic instrumentation. Dr. Campbell's group has an international reputation in optics of the eye and fundus imaging using CLSO technology, and has developed the highest resolution instrument in the world. With this CLSO, they were the first group to achieve real-time imaging of photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye. Based on this expertise, Dr. Campbell's team has developed novel techniques for measuring and comparing the optical properties of healthy and diseased subjects.