Patents by Inventor Heidi Hofer

Heidi Hofer has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 8936364
    Abstract: Embodiments of the invention generally provide apparatuses and methods utilized in optics, and more specifically to apparatuses and methods for adaptive optics correction and imaging. Real-time wavefront sensorless adaptive optics correction and imaging is used with the living human eye to produce optical quality rivaling that of wavefront sensor based control in the similar systems. Using an optimization algorithm that is based on an image quality metric, the apparatus and method optimize the optical quality in ocular image frames acquired with an adaptive optics system.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 19, 2012
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2015
    Assignee: University of Houston System
    Inventors: Jason Porter, Heidi Hofer, Nripun Sredar, Hope Queener, Chaohong Li, Lukasz Sterkowicz
  • Patent number: 6827444
    Abstract: A wavefront aberration of an eye is determined, e.g., in real time. The eye is illuminated, and the light reflected from the retina is converted into spots with a device such as a Hartmann-Shack detector. The displacement of each spot from where it would be in the absence of aberration allows calculation of the aberration. Each spot is located by an iterative technique in which a corresponding centroid is located in a box drawn on the image data, a smaller box is defined around the centroid, the centroid is located in the smaller box, and so on. The wavefront aberration is calculated from the centroid locations by using a matrix in which unusable data can be eliminated simply by eliminating rows of the matrix. Aberrations for different pupil sizes are handled in data taken for a single pupil size by renormalization.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 19, 2002
    Date of Patent: December 7, 2004
    Assignee: University of Rochester
    Inventors: David R. Williams, William J. Vaughn, Benjamin D. Singer, Heidi Hofer, Geun-Young Yoon, Pablo Artal, Juan Luis Arag{dot over (o)}n, Pedro Prieto, Fernando Vargas
  • Publication number: 20030086063
    Abstract: A wavefront aberration of an eye is determined, e.g., in real time. The eye is illuminated, and the light reflected from the retina is converted into spots with a device such as a Hartmann-Shack detector. The displacement of each spot from where it would be in the absence of aberration allows calculation of the aberration. Each spot is located by an iterative technique in which a corresponding centroid is located in a box drawn on the image data, a smaller box is defined around the centroid, the centroid is located in the smaller box, and so on. The wavefront aberration is calculated from the centroid locations by using a matrix in which unusable data can be eliminated simply by eliminating rows of the matrix. Aberrations for different pupil sizes are handled in data taken for a single pupil size by renormalization.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 19, 2002
    Publication date: May 8, 2003
    Inventors: David R. Williams, William J. Vaughn, Benjamin D. Singer, Heidi Hofer, Geun-Young Yoon, Pablo Artal, Juan Luis Aragon, Pedro Prieto, Fernando Vargas
  • Patent number: 6299311
    Abstract: A wavefront aberration of an eye is determined, e.g., in real time. The eye is illuminated, and the light reflected from the retina is converted into spots with a device such as a Hartmann-Shack detector. The displacement of each spot from where it would be in the absence of aberration allows calculation of the aberration. Each spot is located by an iterative technique in which a corresponding centroid is located in a box drawn on the image data, a smaller box is defined around the centroid, the centroid is located in the smaller box, and so on. The wavefront aberration is calculated from the centroid locations by using a matrix in which unusable data can be eliminated simply by eliminating rows of the matrix. Aberrations for different pupil sizes are handled in data taken for a single pupil size by renormalization.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 24, 2000
    Date of Patent: October 9, 2001
    Assignee: University of Rochester
    Inventors: David R. Williams, William J. Vaughn, Benjamin D. Singer, Heidi Hofer, Geun-Young Yoon
  • Patent number: 6199986
    Abstract: A wavefront aberration of an eye is determined, e.g., in real time. The eye is illuminated, and the light reflected from the retina is converted into spots with a device such as a Hartmann-Shack detector. The displacement of each spot from where it would be in the absence of aberration allows calculation of the aberration. Each spot is located by an iterative technique in which a corresponding centroid is located in a box drawn on the image data, a smaller box is defined around the centroid, the centroid is located in the smaller box, and so on. The wavefront aberration is calculated from the centroid locations by using a matrix in which unusable data can be eliminated simply by eliminating rows of the matrix. Aberrations for different pupil sizes are handled in data taken for a single pupil size by renormalization.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 21, 1999
    Date of Patent: March 13, 2001
    Assignee: University of Rochester
    Inventors: David R. Williams, William J. Vaughn, Benjamin D. Singer, Heidi Hofer, Geun-Young Yoon, Pablo Artal, Juan Luis Arag{dot over (o)}n, Pedro Prieto, Fernando Vargas