Coherence gate shaping for wide field high-resolution in vivo retinal imaging with full-field OCT

Allying high-resolution with a large field-of-view (FOV) is of great importance in the fields of biology and medicine, but it is particularly challenging when imaging non-flat living samples such as the human retina. Indeed, high-resolution is normally achieved with adaptive optics (AO) and scanning methods, which considerably reduce the useful FOV and increase the system complexity. An alternative technique is time-domain full-field optical coherence tomography (FF-OCT), which has already shown its potential for in-vivo high-resolution retinal imaging. Here, we introduce coherence gate shaping for FF-OCT, to optically shape the coherence gate geometry to match the sample curvature, thus achieving a larger FOV than previously possible. Using this instrument, we obtained high-resolution images of living human photoreceptors close to the foveal center without AO and with a 1 mm × 1 mm FOV in a single shot. This novel advance enables the extraction of photoreceptor-based biomarkers with ease and spatiotemporal monitoring of individual photoreceptors. We compare our findings with AO-assisted ophthalmoscopes, highlighting the potential of FF-OCT, as a compact system, to become a routine clinical imaging technique.