WATERFALL
The heart of an Adaptive Optics system in Astronomy is the so-called Wavefront Sensor that measures the aberrations of a starlight because of the turbulent atmosphere. The telescope aperture, also called pupil, is of the order of 8m in diameter, typically, and the aberrations evolve with a time scale of the order of a hundredth of a second following a power spectrum said of Kolmogorov. Conceptually similar is the problem of measuring the aberrations in an human eye. The pupil size is in this case just a few millimetres, and their distribution is more often recalled by noting just the principal Seidel aberrations (astigmatism, coma, and so on).
This deep similarity gives the great chance of injecting into the eye care industry the concepts, ideas and technologies developed for astronomical instrumentations. In particular the three dimensional technologies in wavefront sensing developed to assess wide field diffraction limited imaging in large telescopes, being developed to recognize from which altitude a certain aberration is coming from, offers the unique opportunity to develop sensors for the medical eye care industry able to disentangle the aberrations from the lens, the cornea and the retina shape itself.
A working group has been formed in order to define three prototypes of optical systems for eye care measurements that will be implemented at conceptual level in the laboratory of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova and will be engineered by the industry. The program has been funded by MIUR and SIF starting mid 2007. In 2008 a prototype wavefront sensor has been realized for the analysis of intra-ocular lenses, used in the transplant of human crystalline.
People: C. Arcidiacono, J. Farinato, D. Magrin, R. Ragazzoni, V. Viotto
Collaboration: Ufficio di Trasferimento Tecnologico INAF, Catania Univ., SIFI Diagnostic
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