Laser-powered bionic eye gives vision to the blind

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132918-the-laser-powered-bionic-eye-that-gives-576-pixel-grayscale-vision-to-the-blind

by doc4t • 14 years ago

135 33 14 years ago

extremetech.com

simonh• 14 years ago

Until they walk into a French McDonalds.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

zing!

gosu2• 14 years ago

Pithy in-jokes are probably not what people want here.

loceng• 14 years ago

No room for humour in such a serious world...

praptak• 14 years ago

I read the GP post as: "The discussion about the French McDonald incident shows that there might be a real clash between people wearing such aids and an anti-camera culture."

The above obviously contains a great deal of interpretation.

Natsu2• 14 years ago

I believe that almost the same thing happened at an airport.

Natsu2• 14 years ago

Err, why the downvotes? I remember an old story that I can't find a link to about him having these implants forcibly removed at an airport and being unable to fly.

They don't have a great record with medical implants.

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

This may have been a joke and people are responding coldly, but that is something we're going to have to see. As biomods become more frequent and start helping more people, there are going to be biases and hatred to those that look different because of them; and I imagine there will be different kinds of austricizing based on early tech (bulkier systems) and later tech (normal looking eye, except for a couple weird parts that look like tattoos, but are circuitry, for example).

But despite all that, I am sure people will be very. very happy to see again; or in the future, perhaps for the first time.

I wonder when babies will be the subject of these implants, so that babies born blind can still learn how to see properly. This is very exciting!

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

So, ... why the downvotes?

marvin• 14 years ago

Is there anyone on Hacker News who works with this kind of technology, and knows what is holding this technology back from (1) higher resolution and (2) color vision? Obviously that this gets approved is a great achievement, but there is _huge_ room for improvement.

datalus• 14 years ago

The article mentions that they've barely scratched the surface (as it were) of understanding how the optic nerve works in a large way (part of that is color encoding).

I would assume they've gotten this far on a little guesswork and labwork testing how the optic nerve receives and transmits impulses to the brain in a very simple way. So far, it looks like they've figured out how it encodes light/dark shapes (thus grayscale), how the optic nerve encodes the input it receives from the retina as color and how the brain receives that encoding to process it is still a mystery.

devindotcom• 14 years ago

I wrote a few papers about this and have covered it a few times. The main thing holding back this type of vision substitution is the reliability and size of microelectrode arrays. You can get a 1080p camera inside the eyeball, but you have to put that information through the normal process if you're going to take advantage of the brain's vision systems. The earlier you put it in the stream the better, and retinal cells are handily arrayed in a predictable spatial pattern and the mechanisms of the cascades are fairly well understood compared with later downstream stuff that occurs in the V areas of the brain.

Stimulating the optic nerve directly is not really an option (too small, too fine, too unpredictable) and much further in the process and you start skipping critical parts of vision processing. That's why work on cortical blindness will continue for many years after retinal blindness and the like have been addressed.

That said, this stuff was far more experimental 10 years ago and now there are probably a dozen serious research labs doing real life trials of these things, but with different takes on power, input, encapsulation, and so on. It really is exciting but these nonreactive, long-term microelectrode arrays need to be improved if we're to get better resolution and finer control over things like color and shading.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

So why is Europe faster at approving this technology than the US?

jarito• 14 years ago

European and US regulatory approval processes are very different. From what I understand, one of the bigger differences is that some EU regulatory bodies only require that a treatment be proven safe, not effective, whereas the US requires both. This means that in the EU it is sufficient to prove that your treatment is non-harmful, you are not required to prove that it actually works. In the US, you have to do both which can take much more effort.

I'm sure there are other reasons and I'm not an expert, I just had a discussion with a friend of mine that is an AIDS researcher about the drug creation process and I was interested to learn of the difference.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

They've always been faster, and in fact the FDA has been catching up a bit in this regards. Waiting another few years for a cure for blindness isn't too bad. Propranolol, the first major beta-blocker, was approved in Europe in 1965 but the FDA didn't approve its use for hypertension (the most important one) until 1978. That's probably a few 10,000s of deaths right there. Though that has to be weighed against the fact that they probably saved 100s of lives by delaying their approval of practolol, a similar drug with bad side effects, so its not like the FDA's increased vigilance over Europe doesn't provide any benefit.

epikur• 14 years ago

As someone with only one eye, this headline is misleading. But retinal implants are still very cool.

wwwtyro• 14 years ago

That video is an advertisement straight out of a scifi flick.

goatforce5• 14 years ago

The simulated pixelated black and white image in the video is a lot higher than the 25 x 23 resolution mentioned in the article.

maggit• 14 years ago

I measured, and the simulated image in the video seems to have a resolution somewhere around 100x55 pixels (giving them the benefit of errors in measurement). Grossly misleading, if you ask me.

(Unless, of course, the pixel size is about representative and the brain builds up a big image like we see. But that would be worth mentioning explicitly..!)

kellishaver2• 14 years ago

This is so very exciting. For the longest time, treatment of eye diseases has gone a little like this:

Refractive errors? Wear some glasses, contacts, or have LASIK

Corneal diseases? Tricker because you need a donor, but corneal transplant.

Glaucoma? There's a handful surgeries for that depending on type, and a plethora of drugs.

Cataract? I'll take an interocular lens, please.

Partially detached retina? There are moderately successful surgeries to reattach it, rates of success depending a lot on the health of the retina.

Retinal diseases? Sorry, you're screwed.

My left eye was removed when I was in my teens, and the retina of my right eye is damaged fairly extensively due to retinopathy (from being born 2mo premature). It's lead to various complications over the years, as well.

My biggest fear is going blind. I nearly am, and I think I still have a little PTSD from the last round of eye problems.

Now, 576 greyscale pixels isn't much, but it's only going to improve over time.

It's really exciting to think that people in my situation, and possibly even myself someday, will not have to face the prospect of total blindness from retinal disease.

meshko• 14 years ago

Yes, yes. It's not entirely clear whether this will work for retinal detachments, but I really hope it will.

j45• 14 years ago

Now this is innovation.

DigitalJack• 14 years ago

Here is a ted talk about reverse engineering the nerve impulse signals to create these artificial retinas.

It's only about 10 minutes, but a fascinating video.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sheila_nirenberg_a_prosthet...

10dpd2• 14 years ago

This is exciting, but two questions:

Is the implant upgradable? Imagine in 2 years the resolution is doubled but because your an early adopter, you're stuck with the original.

There's more to sight than light - eg when Jesus healed the blind dude in the Bible it took two steps, the first to restore vision, a second to restore perception.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

> Is the implant upgradable?

I wonder how many blind people are going to hold off on this in the hopes that it gets better in five years.

> a second to restore perception

I imagine that this is aimed at people who've gone blind, and therefore have all the neural infrastructure to see and perceive; but it does raise an interesting point of what would happen if you implanted this in someone who was blind from birth. (It brings to mind deaf-from-birth people who have rejected their aural implants, though I think that was largely due to the crapiness of the state of technology at the time, everything sounded like it was being shouted through a pipe full of tin foil and gravel.)

10dpd2• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_from_blindness provides a succinct overview of Molyneux's Problem, a philosophical thought experiment that attempts to address this very issue.

This quote is especially interesting from a 13 year old whose sight was restored in 1728: "When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment of distances, that he thought all object whatever touched his eyes (as he expressed it) as what he felt did his skin"

michaelbuckbee• 14 years ago

Oliver Sacks book: "An Anthropologist on Mars" covered a case of this happening.

There is an interesting writeup with some background at:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/visblind.html

kellishaver2• 14 years ago

This isn't entirely related, but it's an interesting story, so I think I'll share, anyway.

From my personal experience, even restoration of previous eyesight can be pretty unnerving for a bit.

I spent much of last year losing my vision as a cataract in my only eye got progressively worse. I put off surgery as long as possible due to a high risk of complications that could lead to total blindness. By the time I was ready to have the surgery, I couldn't see to do a lot of everyday things, like cook, watch TV, etc. and had a lot of colorblindness and diplopia (sometimes seeing as many as 8 'ghost' images when looking at an object).

The sudden improvement in my vision after cataract surgery took probably two weeks to fully adjust to, mentally. I actually had a bit of paranoia for a while, because I would see things in my vision that I wasn't used to seeing and it would trigger some sort of panic response. I hadn't been totally blind prior to the operation, but suddenly there was all of this detail that hadn't been there before (or that I hadn't seen in months, anyway).

I'd look at something and it was blue or had texture or cast a shadow. It made it very hard to concentrate. Everything was a distraction.

I remember that I had a mild panic attack one day shortly after surgery when we stopped for lunch. We were seated next to a window in the restaurant and it was very windy and cloudy outside. The wind blowing the clouds around was causing shifts in lighting coming in through the window and it was just too much sensory input for me to handle.

will_work4tears• 14 years ago

When they make those glucose batteries small enough I can see they'd be useful for this implant. I can't find the article with the output, but I'm thinking it was like 5 mW and those glasses only output 3, so seems like it's doable.

Very exciting stuff. Now for curing baldness and letting me regrow my teeth.

basicallydan• 14 years ago

This is freaking AWESOME.

Does anybody know what the most common type of blindness is?

DrorY• 14 years ago

I see that the video is from 2010. Is there anything newer since?

Laser-powered bionic eye gives vision to the blind

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