Performance measurements of an infrared digital scanning laser ophthalmoscope

Direct digital acquisition of images using a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) offers several advantages over the conventional fundus camera; in particular, the ability to produce tomographic images using a confocal aperture. This note describes measurements of the performance of an SLO. Spatial resolution, measured by the modulation transfer function, MTF, was shown to be worse along the direction of scan. As expected, image uniformity was good, with a coefficient of variation of 1.9%. While the effect of using a 100 microns diameter confocal aperture instead of one with a 400 microns diameter was to reduce slice thickness from 2600 microns to 975 microns, image intensity was reduced by a factor of 30.