Good news! The day is approaching when the blind can see again!
"A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne has developed a retinal implant that transposes images acquired by camera-equipped smart glasses into a simplified, black and white image made from 10,500 pixels. Although it has not been approved for human trial yet, the team has tested the implant in both a mouse model and a dedicated virtual reality programme, reporting the findings in Communications Materials.
For many patients suffering from retinitis pigmentosa – an inherited disease where progressive loss of retinal photoreceptors eventually leads to blindness – current retinal implants do not provide clear benefits. In fact, three years after surgery, most patients have stopped using them. ..."
"Retinal prostheses hold the promise of restoring vision in totally blind people. However, a decade of clinical trials highlighted quantitative limitations hampering the possibility of reaching this goal. A key challenge in retinal stimulation is to independently activate retinal neurons over a large portion of the subject’s visual field. ...
Here, we propose a wide-field curved organic photovoltaic epiretinal prosthesis with a high pixel density to address the aforementioned limitations. The high-density POLYRETINA implant was conceived to offer a large visual angle requiring minimal head scanning and a high resolution through epiretinal network-mediated stimulation, thus overcoming the nerve fibre’s direct activation. However, a high pixel density of the prosthesis does not necessarily correlate with high visual discrimination since the response resolution at the retinal ganglion cell (RGC) level might be altered by the high spatial interconnectivity of the retinal network ... Therefore, we investigated ex vivo the response resolution provided by this high-density retinal prosthesis. Our results demonstrated that POLYRETINA could achieve a high spatial resolution in epiretinal stimulation, which is a substantial step forward for artificial vision."
Here, we propose a wide-field curved organic photovoltaic epiretinal prosthesis with a high pixel density to address the aforementioned limitations. The high-density POLYRETINA implant was conceived to offer a large visual angle requiring minimal head scanning and a high resolution through epiretinal network-mediated stimulation, thus overcoming the nerve fibre’s direct activation. However, a high pixel density of the prosthesis does not necessarily correlate with high visual discrimination since the response resolution at the retinal ganglion cell (RGC) level might be altered by the high spatial interconnectivity of the retinal network ... Therefore, we investigated ex vivo the response resolution provided by this high-density retinal prosthesis. Our results demonstrated that POLYRETINA could achieve a high spatial resolution in epiretinal stimulation, which is a substantial step forward for artificial vision."
Here is the link to the underlying research article:
No comments:
Post a Comment