page_title: Scanning laser ophthalmoscopy
section_title: Procedure
hierarchical_section_title: Scanning laser ophthalmoscopy / Adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy / Procedure
caption_attribution_description: English: Setup of an adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy device
context_page_description: Scanning laser ophthalmoscopy is a method of examination of the eye. It uses the technique of confocal laser scanning microscopy for diagnostic imaging of the retina or cornea of the human eye.
  As a method used to image the retina with a high degree of spatial sensitivity, it is helpful in the diagnosis of glaucoma, macular degeneration, and other retinal disorders. It has further been combined with adaptive optics technology to provide sharper images of the retina.
context_section_description: The subject is placed in a dental impression mount fixed in a way to make it possible to manipulate the head in three dimensions. The subject's pupils are dilated using a dilating agent to minimize fluctuations from accommodation. After the eyes are sufficiently dilated, the subject is told to fixate on a target while in the mount.
  Once the subject is properly placed, wavefront correction and imaging takes place. A laser is collimated and then reflected off of a beam-splitting mirror. As in confocal SLO, light must pass through both a horizontal and a vertical scanning mirror before and after the eye is scanned to align the moving beam for eventual retinal faster images of the retina. Additionally, the light is reflected off of a deformable mirror before and after exposure to the eye to diffuse optical aberrations. The laser enters the eye through the pupil to illuminate the region it has been focused onto and light reflected back leaves the same way.  Light returning from the mirrors passes through the first beam splitter onto another beam splitter where it is directed simultaneously toward a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and toward a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor array. The light going toward the photomultiplier is focused through a confocal microscopy pinhole to remove light not reflecting off of the plane of interest and then recorded in the PMT.  Light directed to the wavefront sensor array is split up by the lenslets in the array and then recorded onto a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera for detection of optical aberrations. These aberrations are then subtracted from the images recorded in the PMT to vastly increase lateral resolution.
caption: Diagram of the AOSLO setup
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