David Williams' Lab

David R. Williams
William G. Allyn Chair of Medical Optics
Director, Center for Visual Science
Professor of Optics, Ophthalmology, Biomedical Engineering, & Brain & Cognitive Sciences

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We use adaptive optics, the same technique used by astronomers to take clear pictures of the sky through the earth's turbulent atmosphere, to explore the organization and function of the retina and the optical and neural limits on human vision. Just as atmospheric turbulence distorts light arriving from distant stars, imperfections in the eye's cornea and lens distort light passing through the eye, causing blurred images to be formed on the retina.

With adaptive optics, which uses a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor to measure the eye's imperfections and a deformable mirror to correct them, we can correct most of the optical aberrations in the eye, providing the eye with the best image quality ever achieved. This means we can look into the eye and see the retina more clearly than was ever possible before, even allowing us to see individual cells in the living retina, but also that we can look out from the eye and see a much sharper view of the world than ever seen before. In addition to learning more about the retina, we use adaptive optics to examine the potential for improving vision by correcting the optical aberrations of the eye, and to probe the neural limits on human vision.

Mosaic of cone receptors in the living eye
Image by Austin Roorda