Clinical and Translational Imaging Section

Adaptive optics is a technology for measuring and correcting the optical imperfections utilized in astronomy, microscopy, and vision science. When combined with a state-of-the-art ophthalmic imaging platform, highly detailed images of the cells in the human retina can be acquired.

The approach is to visualize healthy and diseased cells directly inside patients’ eyes to determine the sequence and timing of all the cumulative microscopic changes that give rise to clinically-significant disease phenotypes. Our research spans the development, implementation, and application of advanced optical instrumentation, as well as the acquisition, processing, and analysis of rich imaging datasets. We are particularly interested in studying the outer retina, consisting of photoreceptor neurons, retinal pigment epithelial cells, and choriocapillaris blood vessels. This multi-layered complex is not only critical for the phenomenon of vision, but also, is a useful system for modeling the in vivo interactions of neurons, epithelial cells, and vasculature within the central nervous system, in health, aging, and disease.

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Custom software tools developed by the Tam lab are available through the NEI Commons, a virtual infrastructure to enable sharing. Visit the NEI Commons .

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Peer-reviewed journal publications

A.J. Bower, F. Zhang, T. Liu, J. Li, N. Aguilera, S. Abouassali, J. Krynitsky, R. Pursley, T. Pohida, B. Kowalski, R. Lu, A. Dubra, and J. Tam, “ Surpassing the diffraction limit for improved lateral resolution in adaptive optics optical coherence tomography of the living human eye ,” Communications Engineering 5(3), 2026

V. Das, A.J. Bower, N. Aguilera, J. Li, and J. Tam, “ Artificial Intelligence Assisted Adaptive Optics Imaging Enables Dense Pixel Sampling from Sparse Measurements ,” npj Artificial Intelligence 1:48, 2025

J. Li, J. Liu, V. Das, H. Le, N. Aguilera, A.J. Bower, J.P. Giannini, R. Lu, S. Abouassali, E.Y. Chew, B.P. Brooks, W.M. Zein, L.A. Huryn, A. Volkov, T. Liu, and J. Tam, “ Artificial intelligence assisted clinical fluorescence imaging achieves in vivo cellular resolution comparable to adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy ,” Communications Medicine 5:105, 2025

V. Das, F. Zhang, A.J. Bower, J. Li, T. Liu, N. Aguilera, B. Alvisio, Z. Liu, D.X. Hammer, and J. Tam, “ Revealing speckle obscured living human retinal cells with artificial intelligence assisted adaptive optics optical coherence tomography ,” Communications Medicine 4:68, 2024

J. Li*, D. Wang*, J. Pottenburgh, A.J. Bower, S. Asanad, E.W. Lai, C. Simon, L. Im, L.A. Huryn, Y. Tao, J. Tam, and O.J. Saeedi, “ Visualization of erythrocyte stasis in the living human eye reveals microvascular dysfunction in disease ,” (*equal contribution), iScience 26(1):105755, 2023

H. Heitkotter*, E.J. Patterson*, E.N. Woertz, J.A. Cava, M. Gaffney, I. Adhan, J. Tam, R.F. Cooper, and J. Carroll, “ Extracting spacing-derived estimates of rod density in healthy retinae ,” (*equal contribution) Biomedical Optics Express 14 (1):1-17, 2023

N. Aguilera, T. Liu, A.J. Bower, J. Li, S. Abouassali, R. Lu, J. Giannini, M. Pfau, C. Bender, M.G. Smelkinson, A. Naik, B. Guan, O. Schwartz, A. Volkov, A. Dubra, Z. Liu, D.X. Hammer, D. Maric, R. Fariss, R.B. Hufnagel, B.G. Jeffrey, B.P. Brooks, W.M. Zein, L.A. Huryn, and J. Tam, “ Widespread subclinical cellular changes revealed across a neural-epithelial-vascular complex in choroideremia using adaptive optics ,” Communications Biology 5:893, 2022

T. Liu, N. Aguilera, A.J. Bower, J. Li, E. Ullah, A. Dubra, C. Cukras, B.P. Brooks, B.G. Jeffrey, R.B. Hufnagel, L.A. Huryn, W.M. Zein, and J. Tam, " Photoreceptor and retinal pigment epithelium relationships in eyes with vitelliform macular dystrophy revealed by multimodal adaptive optics imaging ," Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science 63(8):27, 2022

J.P. Giannini, R. Lu, A.J. Bower, R. Fariss, and J. Tam, “ Visualizing retinal cells with adaptive optics imaging using a translational imaging framework ,” Biomedical Optics Express 13(5):3042-3055, 2022

J. Liu, C. Shen, N. Aguilera, C. Cukras, R.B. Hufnagel, W.M. Zein, T. Liu, and J. Tam, “ Active Cell Appearance Model Induced Generative Adversarial Networks for Annotation-Efficient Cell Segmentation and Identification on Adaptive Optics Retinal Images ,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 40(1):2820-2831, 2021

R. Lu, N. Aguilera, T. Liu, J. Liu, J.P. Giannini, J. Li, A.J. Bower, A. Dubra, and J. Tam, “ In vivo sub-diffraction adaptive optics imaging of photoreceptors in the human eye with annular pupil illumination and sub-Airy detection, ” Optica 8(3):333-343, 2021

J. Li*, T. Liu*, O.J. Flynn, A. Turriff, Z. Liu, E. Ullah, J. Liu, A. Dubra, M.A. Johnson, B.P. Brooks, R.B. Hufnagel, D.X. Hammer, L.A. Huryn, B.G. Jeffrey, J. Tam, “ Persistent dark cones in oligocone trichromacy revealed by multimodal adaptive optics ophthalmoscopy ” (*equal contribution), Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 13:629214, 2021

A.J. Bower, T. Liu, N. Aguilera, J. Li, J. Liu, R. Lu, J.P. Giannini, L.A. Huryn, A. Dubra, Z. Liu, D.X. Hammer, and J. Tam, “ Integrating adaptive optics-SLO and OCT for multimodal visualization of the human retinal pigment epithelial mosaic, ” Biomedical Optics Express 12(3):1449-1466, 2021

J. Liu, Y. Han, T. Liu, N. Aguilera, and J. Tam, “ Spatially Aware Dense-LinkNet Based Regression Improves Fluorescent Cell Detection in Adaptive Optics Ophthalmic Images ,” IEEE Journal of Biomedical Health Informatics 24(12):3520-3528, 2020 (Journal Cover; Featured Article)

N. Kedia, Z. Liu, R.D. Sochol, J. Tam, D.X. Hammer, A. Agrawal, “ 3-D Printed Photoreceptor Phantoms for Evaluating Lateral Resolution of Adaptive Optics Imaging Systems, ” Optics Letters 44(7):1825-1828, 2019 (Editor’s pick)

H. Jung, J. Liu, T. Liu, A. George, M. Smelkinson, S. Cohen, R. Sharma, O. Schwartz, A. Maminishkis, K. Bharti, C. Cukras, L.A. Huryn, B.P. Brooks, R. Fariss, and J. Tam, “ Longitudinal adaptive optics fluorescence microscopy reveals cellular mosaicism in patients, ” JCI Insight 4(6):e124904, 2019

H. Jung*, T. Liu*, J. Liu, L. A. Huryn, and J. Tam, “ Combining multimodal adaptive optics imaging and angiography improves visualization of human eyes with cellular level resolution, ” Communications Biology 1:189, 2018 (*equal contribution) (Editor’s pick – first year anniversary collection)

J. Liu, H. Jung, A. Dubra, and J. Tam, “ Cone Photoreceptor Cell Segmentation and Diameter Measurement on Adaptive Optics Images Using Circularly-Constrained Active Contour Model ,” Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science 59(11):4639-4652, 2018

Z. Liu, J. Tam, O. Saeedi, D.X. Hammer, “ Trans-retinal cellular imaging with multimodal adaptive optics, ” Biomedical Optics Express 9(9):4246-4262, 2018

B. Gu, X. Wang, M.D. Twa, J. Tam, C.A. Girkin, and Y. Zhang, “ Noninvasive in vivo characterization of erythrocyte motion in human retinal capillaries using high-speed adaptive optics near confocal imaging ,” Biomedical Optics Express 9(8):3653-3677, 2018

T. Liu, H. Jung, J. Liu, M. Droettboom, and J. Tam, “ Noninvasive near infrared autofluorescence imaging of retinal pigment epithelial cells in the human retina using adaptive optics, ” Biomedical Optics Express 8(10):4348-4360, 2017

J. Liu, H. Jung, A. Dubra, and J. Tam, “ Automated Photoreceptor Cell Identification on Non-Confocal Adaptive Optics Images Using Multi-Scale Circular Voting, ” Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science 58(11):4477-4489, 2017

W. Ma, Y. Zhang, C. Gao, R. Fariss, J. Tam, W. Wong, “ Monocyte infiltration reestablishes retinal myeloid cell homeostasis following retinal pigment epithelial cell injury, ” Scientific Reports 7:8433, 2017

J. Tam, J. Liu, A. Dubra, R. Fariss, “ In vivo imaging of the human retinal pigment epithelial mosaic using adaptive optics enhanced indocyanine green ophthalmoscopy, ” Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science 57(10):4376-4384, 2016

J. Tam and D. Merino, “ STORM in comparison with STED and other imaging methods ,” Journal of Neurochemistry 135(4): 643-658, 2015 (Journal Cover)

Peer-reviewed conference papers Other Publications