Optical design of a full-pupil field, non-contact and high resolution corneal curved objective lens

It has been a challenge to overcome the corneal curvature radius to design a full-pupil field, non-contact and high resolution corneal curved objective lens, which covers the cornea full-pupil field and has the ability to resolve corneal cells. In this paper, we report an optical design of a full-pupil field, non-contact corneal curved objective lens for high resolution cornea imaging. The advantages of this lens are that it has a wide field of view (FOV) with the corneal curved image surface, maintains the beam normal incidence, as well as non-contact lens imaging, and offers a cell-level lateral resolution of cornea structure. The analysis of optimization shows that the system achieves diffraction limit in a circular FOV of 4 mm diameter covering the full-pupil zone. The theoretical lateral resolution is about 2.5 μm with an image space NA of 0.16, which is sufficient to resolve corneal cells of 7 μm diameter, and the working distance is larger than 15 mm which is enough for a non-contact objective lens. So the optical design is effectively and efficiently meeting the demand of specifications.