Making WAIVS: Team Builds Adaptive Optics Technology to Advance Ophthalmic Imaging Research

Making WAIVS

Team Builds Adaptive Optics Technology to Advance Ophthalmic Imaging Research 

The Wisconsin Advanced Imaging of Visual Systems (WAIVS) Lab, founded in 2018, is an exciting, collaborative initiative aimed at exploring novel ways of imaging the visual system.

The WAIVS project brings together a group of engineers, basic science researchers, and clinicians who are building an imaging lab featuring an Adaptive Optics (AO) platform. AO is a recent novel innovation in retinal imaging that works to correct higher order aberrations of the eye, allowing visualization of photoreceptors and other retinal structures at a cellular resolution in vivo.

The WAIVS research team is creating an AO platform consisting of two AO Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscope imaging systems; one for use in human subject research with over-arching goals of understanding retinal pathology on a cellular scale and exploring novel ways to monitor therapeutic response to innovative retinal therapeutics, including gene and stem cell-based therapies; and a system dedicated for animal research and optical imaging innovation in the visual system.

This AO platform provides an integrated environment where human subject imaging will motivate R&D leading to innovations that are developed and optimized on the research system and then rapidly translated back to human subject imaging.

Learn more about WAIVS at UW—Madison

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Researchers reviewing images on a computer display in the WAIVS lab

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