Human eye anisoplanatism: eye as a lamellar structure

In this paper we consider anisoplanatism effect as a fundamental limitation on the size of high resolution area (isoplanatic patch) of retinal images obtained using fundus cameras equipped with adaptive optics. Isoplanatic patch size was estimated using experimental results for on-axis and off-axis eye aberrations measured by Shack-Hartmann technique. Isoplanatic patch size varied among examined subjects in the range from 1.5 degrees to 2.5 degrees which is in good agreement with results obtained using ray-tracing technique(1). We estimated isoplanatic patch size for Gullstrand eye model and found it to be close to the values obtained from experimental results for subjects with good vision. We also discuss the possibilities of Gullstrand eye model modifications for modeling anisoplanatism effect for each particular subject. We also estimated the efficiency of multibeacon correction method and found out that this method allows us to almost twice increase the area with high resolution.