Man's high-tech paradise lost: bionic eye removed

http://www.thewhig.com/2012/11/28/mans-high-tech-paradise-lost

by edward • 12 years ago

161 78 12 years ago

edward2• 12 years ago

Wired Magazine article about him having the bionic eye installed: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision_pr.html

gfodor• 12 years ago

One of my friends is "one of the techs" in that article when the dude has the seizure. He doesn't like talking about his adventure to Portugal with the insane mad scientist surgeon.

e12e2• 12 years ago

Thank you for that -- I've been looking for that link for years. I remember reading it when it came out, but for some reason was unable to find it in the archives the few times I went looking for it since.

edward2• 12 years ago

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

He says the loss of his sight, the second time, was more profound to him than the first, because it was permanent.

Why was the first time non-permanent while the second time was? Did the system damage his visual system in his brain?

Udo2• 12 years ago

There is most likely extensive damage now due to taking the interface out, so there might not be enough neural substance to attach anything to anymore.

Did the system damage his visual system in his brain?

I know of no working system that attaches directly to the optic nerve, and the article is very light on details. I assume these implants worked by projecting light on retina remnants. In cases where the eye is destroyed but some of the light-sensing apparatus is still intact, there is the potential for a device that sends light directly into the remaining rods and cones.

This is different from a direct electrical interface, which remains the holy grail of brain-machine interfaces.

canjobear• 12 years ago

The old Wired article posted by edward has more details. It looks like the machine sent signals directly into electrodes in V1. Seems crazy to me!

pocketstar8• 12 years ago

I doubt they would have removed the Microelectrode arrays from the brain, that would have caused serious damage as the MEAs would be encapsulated in glial scar tissue. The article made it sound like they just removed the two jacks from his skull.

The devices were probably Utah Microelectrode Arrays(MEAs) the MEAs were no doubt implanted on the visual cortex on the cerebral cortex to induce phospehnes.

This is no holy grail, and MEAs have provided computer-brain interfaces since the 80's.

check out my other comments in the thread for more information

Gracana• 12 years ago

I don't think he means that it is technically impossible, just that before he had hope and an opportunity, and now the opportunity is gone and there is no other one like it.

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

He had the jacks removed from his skull at Kingston General Hospital in 2010 as they were infecting badly, due to being made of titanium.

I was under the impression that titanium was one of the few materials considered to be safe for human implantation.

serf• 12 years ago

titanium is safe. the jack part is unsafe.

to have a subdermal anchor for external hardware is extremely tricky. flesh pockets around the anchor and has tons of potential for infection after prolonged use.

I , too, was confused by the wording.

waps2• 12 years ago

The way I understand it is this : if an implant is nice and smooth and well integrated with it's surrounding tissue then a titanium implant is safe. Safe in the sense that the immune system won't attack it just because it's there, like it would with metal or frankly almost any substance (the 2 exceptions are titanium and gold, just ask someone with earrings what happens if you insert a silver or metal earring near a scratch).

If the implant has sharp edges, or rips into the surrounding tissue, or otherwise causes cells to die or prevents repair of damaged tissue somehow, the immune system will go looking for a culprit[1]. If it decides that the implant is the culprit, bad luck. It will attempt to surround the implant and expel it. Depending on the size this may or may not work (this is what happens to splinters of wood that get into your body, for example). This can even cause the immune system to decide a bone is the culprit, if it does you have rheumatoid arthritis (it's a condition that you are very likely to get if you live long enough)

Furthermore, implants may actually infect, as in a bacterial colony may develop on their surface (because the contact surface with the immune system is much smaller, an infection has a bigger chance to maintain that position. Always keep in mind that the immune system wins against bacteria not because it's better or smarter, but because it has 80kg of cells working logistics for it). The same can happen to bones.

[1] To be exact, cells have an "alarm" signal molecule floating inside them. If the cell is ordered to commit suicide (apoptosis), it will put out an enzyme that neutralizes this alarm molecule before ripping itself to shreds, the same will happen if the immune system orders a cell to eat itself (autophagy). But if the cell dies for some other reason (e.g. getting ripped to shreds, explosion due to infection, ...) the alarm signal will be spread into the surrounding tissue where the immune system can find it. When it finds it, it will come in force to check out the situation. If it keeps seeing this signal without finding a cause, the immune system will go insane/react badly.

dm26• 12 years ago

The "jacks" they are referring to are the openings in the skin where the wires come out of, I'm guessing one for data and one for power.

Artificial openings in the body are very difficult to keep from getting infected.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/images/FF.Sight...

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

It will attempt to surround the implant and expel it. Depending on the size this may or may not work (this is what happens to splinters of wood that get into your body, for example)

Very cool. I had a splinter sink into my finger once, and abandoned the project of getting it out. Sure enough, it eventually emerged on its own; in my memory it was coated with a thin layer of some clear substance.

Always keep in mind that the immune system wins against bacteria not because it's better or smarter, but because it has 80kg of cells working logistics for it

I weigh less than 80 kilograms. What's that g stand for?

csomar• 12 years ago

the 2 exceptions are titanium and gold

Are you sure about this? A friend hit me with a pencil 5 years ago, and this caused some graphite to enter inside my skin. The graphite is still there to date and I got no pain, infection, reaction from it.

fractallyte• 12 years ago

Titanium dental implants are rough: the rougher, the better. It helps them to osseointegrate (bond with bone).

Because the majority of titanium implants are two-piece (a screw and an abutment), bacteria can enter through micro-gaps between the components, and thrive within the actual implant. This often leads to peri-implantitis.

Single-piece implants don't have this problem (but usually have many others).

Disclaimer: I'm working with a 'maverick' doctor who invented a (revolutionary) non-surgical dental implant.

Udo2• 12 years ago

As others have pointed out, the titanium remark is a non-sequitur. The infection was most likely caused by the implant breaking the skin, which is an absolute medical blunder to begin with. For the device to have had any chance of working in the long run, it would have to be completely sealed within the eye socket. In there, it could be recharged using induction and it could receive data through an optical or radio interface that sends signals across the skin. There is not a lot of information about the device or the procedure they used to install it, but the whole thing sounds as if it was poorly conceived.

leoc2• 12 years ago

It seems that there's some promise of medical devices that can break the skin relatively safely, but it's still early days: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-26721547

pocketstar8• 12 years ago

BIOCOMPATIBLITY is the key word here. Titanium is a very biocompatible material. The article is pretty much flat out wrong here, it is impossible for titanium to cause an infection. >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection

Having a chronic wound from the protruding titanium electrode however would increase the risk of infection, but the material is independent of the infection.

dm26• 12 years ago

Why did the devices start to fail after 8 weeks? Was it because of the infection?

Are there any similar devices that have been installed in people that have been more successful?

$100,000+ for 8 weeks of sight is very sad to think about.

What was the approximate resolution of the image that he saw?

WEAR YOUR SAFETY GLASSES!

userbinator3• 12 years ago

That works out to ~$100/hr.

What was the approximate resolution of the image that he saw?

From the article it says he saw well enough to drive, so it must've been pretty good.

WEAR YOUR SAFETY GLASSES!

"Carol never wore her safety goggles. Now she doesn't need them."

dm26• 12 years ago

The Wired article that someone else linked to says that the resolution was 32 x 32 (1024), if that's the same person.

The amazing part is that the brain quickly learns to interpret the signals and can create an image.

I wonder if the brains image is a higher resolution than the camera considering it's basically processing the raw data and can apply very complex "algorithms" to the data to present an image.

I wasn't saying the price was too high, just that it's interesting to think about how lucky we are to have sight for free and that people with not very much money would spend everything just for the chance to regain a small amount of vision.

e12e2• 12 years ago

"Carol never wore her safety goggles. Now she doesn't need them."

Wasn't that "Em" who doesn't need them? ;)

iskander2• 12 years ago

Are there any similar devices that have been installed in people that have been more successful? When I was following the retinal implant research several years ago, you'd typically give the patient a few dozen pixels of vision and then the electrodes and the neurons they're stimulating would drift out of sync.

It sounds like there's now a commercial product for people with severely limited vision (Argus) which claims to have stable implants over multiple years in hundreds of patients. Not sure what the quality is like though, and not sure if the technology generalizes to the fully blind (who may have entirely atrophied optic nerves).

pocketstar8• 12 years ago

Scaring probably caused the microelectrode array(MEA) to fail. There is significant research going into MEAs and they are becoming much more viable for long term in vivo use.

watson• 12 years ago

Talk about bad luck! Loosing the sight in one eye at a time in two separate, but almost exact incidents

jzwinck• 12 years ago

I'm sorry to say this but it sounds like bad risk management. At 17 he lost one eye to flying metal. At that point he might have chosen to be more cautious with his remaining eye, e.g. wearing some form of glasses at all times. But just three years later he lost the second eye...in the same sort of accident. It's not good luck, but it isn't only bad luck.

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

The important takeaway is that the social effects of being blind are very big. They could be mitigated entirely without technology, with cultural changes.

pmr_• 12 years ago

This argument can be made for many different disabilities (mental as well as physical). While I don't think we should stop pursuing development of cures we should refocus our efforts on enabling the afflicted to live the life they want.

leoc2• 12 years ago

You can actually do prosthetic vision without surgery, thanks to the magic (and I use the word advisedly :) ) of sensory substitution: http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kuipers/readings/Bach-y-Rita-natur... . The latency of sound-based sensory-subsitution systems is very high though.

jaekwon• 12 years ago

I remember the story of a guy who could ride a bicycle by using his tongue to make a loud sound that bounces off of objects. Not sure if it's real, but it sounds plausible.

And this. All of these are amazing.

JonoBB• 12 years ago

Here we go: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19524962

twic• 12 years ago

But the biggest problem facing the 16 patients who had signed up for the surgery was that the lead doctor, William H. Dobelle, was ill. He died while the 16th patient was still recovering from surgery in hospital.
The project ended with his death.
“When he died, there was no medical journal on the 16 patients, with myself being the first one implanted. Nothing was ever written and documented.

What the fuck? An experimental surgical procedure is being conducted, and nothing is recorded outside on elderly doctor's brain?

Retric2• 12 years ago

I suspect he may have had encrypted his notes/HDD and with his death the information was lost.

pyronite• 12 years ago

What reason do you have to suspect this extraordinary measure?

jakobe• 12 years ago

It's also odd that the patients had to pay for the experimental surgery. This doesn't sound like a serious clinical trial, it sounds like a hack performed by some back-alley doc in a dystopic science fiction story...

nnq6• 12 years ago

It just shows that the old doc was a brave maverick that had the courage to go through with it even without the funding he needed! That's why everything probably fell through after his death. He probably funded most of it with his time and money, took all the shortcuts he could because he had to (hence the poor reliability - it failed after eight weeks), and asked the patients to pay for the rest.

It's not a dystopic science fiction story, it's how slow and cumbersome and real world engineering based medical research works, and how the only way to make any meaningful progress fast enough (if you're not in one of the few well funded and well staffed places in the world, working on one of the few projects that are considered "important"), is to work around the system, cheat and look for sloppy shortcuts, ask the poor patients for money directly, and how everything crumbles when the one genius/madman that pulled all those tricks to make it work goes out of the picture.

Trufa• 12 years ago

it sounds like a hack performed by some back-alley doc in a dystopic science fiction story...

I mean, they did manage to give him back his sight for a limited period of time, that's pretty amazing technology if you ask me, not the kind a hack would achieve, but yes, it's very unfortunate that he lost it again, that must be some terrible pain.

I agree it might not sound too professional, but it seems to me that it's more about how this article is putting it and the reality may be more complex.

namlem• 12 years ago

I mean the doctor was legit. He was licensed and the procedure worked. He was just negligent when it came to record keeping.

nnq6• 12 years ago

Considering how primitive the tech looks, someone could surely reverse-engineer it... but good luck trying to get funding for it and trying to find surgeons willing to take the risk of it blowing up in their face, because they will inevitably take the blame for any "bug" the tech could have :)

The old doc was probably brave enough to do it while circumventing the whole regulatory process and using his personal reputation and charisma and professional relationships to pull it through and get the funding he needed, so again, good luck finding anyone to replace him.

privong• 12 years ago

What the fuck? An experimental surgical procedure is being conducted, and nothing is recorded outside on elderly doctor's brain?

The data may exist. But it's non-trivial to recreate an experiment or interpret results with only lab notebooks, especially for experiments which were not completed. Despite the best of intentions, even with well-kept notes, not everything is recorded – the doctor's not-completely-formed thoughts (e.g., on topics such as where the experiment should go next, possible issues that might arise) would be the key to moving forward and might not hvae been recorded because they weren't at an advanced enough stage to commit to writing (in the sense that not everyone immediately writes down every idea they have about something, even if that idea later becomes crucial).

frozenport• 12 years ago

One doctor can't do this work alone!?

What about the guys that made the hardware. This story is missing some key details.

danford• 12 years ago

What's going to happen when things like this become common and they're attached to storage devices? Like when we have BMIs and neuro prosthetics, how will copyright law be enforced? will there be a special "data control agency" that has access to my BMI to make sure I don't copy any information I don't own? Hopefully we'll have some sane laws regarding copyright and software patents by that time. IMO we're on our way to a point where the government needs to step in and keep this kind of hardware/software open source and imho they also need to make laws that make not reporting a bug a semi-serious crime, and very serious crime for agencies that exploit bugs in secret.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

Our eyes are already attached to a mass storage (and processing) device, and although it has a very high capacity, it tends to be rather lossy and have high error rates. :-)

It will certainly be an interesting future, and I hope it is one where information becomes even more free.

clef• 12 years ago

That mass storage device can even be permanently damaged if dropped on the floor :)

NolF• 12 years ago

I think copyright would be the least of the worries. Think about the implications it would have in courts for common traffic offenses, non-violent crimes (including drug use), and maintaining corporate and state secrets. Then also consider other the privacy considerations day to day kind of stuff to even child pornography (minors with this implant).

Ideally the BMI would be as protected as the brain in a 5th amendment sense, but it's a very quick and tempting slippery slope...

nnq6• 12 years ago

People do realize that this technology is now proven to work, right? And because you can now do everything the wireless way (including the charging part), and using off-the-shelf components (you just need to find a subset of components that can be easily "approved for medical use"), and you'll have 99% less risk of infection!

Basically the successors of this technology should already be on the market now! They aren't simply because nobody found a way to make a huge profits and medical doctors are too technophobes and/or drowning in other problems that need their immediate attention to afford take risk* and make the effort of begging the government to fund this.

gus_massa• 12 years ago

This is still unproven. There are only a few (¿one?) anecdotes of the experimental subjects, and they can’t show how amazingly good the result were because the device no longer works.

Another comment says that the device resolution was 32x32 (this article says that they see “dots”), it’s much better than a 0x0 resolution, but it’s the resolution of an icon. If you have ever drawn an icon, you’d know that 32x32 is not too much.

There are similar device for audition, but the wires don’t go directly to the brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant

Let’s hope that this camera device or a similar device gets fixed until it’s useful in the long term. But it’s important to remember that there are a lot of technical details that need to get fixed, and a lot of clinical test to prove that it’s not a scam, snake oil, an optimistic misrepresentation or any combination of them.

nnq6• 12 years ago

To be honest, it was probably a dead-end tech that could've worked, but will probably not be developed because other approaches are kind of safer and worked on by more reputable scientists: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1711/1489... (this one is 38x40, and it's probably easier to get it higher res too :) )

But when it was first tested, it was what seemed to work best, but was abandoned because of the place it was developed in and the (lack of) scientific reputation of the person working on it. The thing with these kinds of things is that you need "proof by engineering and experiment", so if you don't throw money at them before knowing how well they work, you'll never know if they work at all... or you'll never have more than one working technology to choose from. The whole "fund just the best ideas" approach in medical engineering is disastrous imho because the problem space is so huge that you never know what might turn out to work and for what, and at the same time, you obviously can't just do "garage/basement experiments" on these kinds of things, so any equivalent of "wacky garage experiments" actually needs to be funded... this technology was a nice "exploration" of one way to solve a problem.

iskander2• 12 years ago

And because you can now do everything the wireless way

Citation please? That certainly wasn't the case last time I was reading this corner of the research literature (6ish years ago).

nnq6• 12 years ago

Don't you have all the needed technologies and pieces in any high end mobile phone? Yeah, there's the electronics for the implanted electrodes, but I doubt they can't be made small enough to be put under the skin.

You's basically have a smaller-smartphone sized computer implanted somewhere under the skin (above the pectoral? somewhere else? dunno - just make a larger version of the casing used for peacemakers), with a wirelessly rechargeable battery (existing tech - just google), a subcutaneous bunch of wires going to the implanted electrode (again, tech similar to what you have in current pacemakers), and this will be wirelessly linked to the camera (existing tech - just need to find something low power on the receiving end). If you need more computing power in the loop, you'd have another smartphone sized device in the patients pocket, getting the wireless feed from the camera, processing it and streaming to the subcutaneous one. But wait, you already have things like the Google Glass that have a camera + enough computing power and wireless capabilities baked in, and ready to be mass produced, thanks Google.

Going further, when the electronics get low power enough, the wirelessly charging implantable battery (a bit large, and deadly if it ever leaks, but thankfully not hard to safely case/coat) could be replaced with a glucose fuel cell (not yet available, so stick to the battery for now, but doable in the future according to: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130322/srep01516/full/srep01...).

Now yes, none of these are "medical grade" or "medically approved" techs or anything, there is real work in putting them together, and the whole biocompat coating is again existing tech, you just need the expertise of an existing implantable devices manufacturer, but it's "just" a matter of glueing together some existing parts. Take a team of good hw engineers from any telcom company and they'd know how to do it.

...but to be honest, the real solution for blindness caused by retinal damage is probably something like this: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1711/1489... , and since this is probably the best path, it doesn't matter that much this old doc's researches got to an end...

jrochkind1• 12 years ago

“There I met people who were blind as well. (Blind) people over there were so included in society I almost didn’t think about my blindness for a time.
“Then, when I came back here I realized that part of why I was chasing these dreams of seeing again was because that’s the way, in this society, I can be included. Despite the fact that when I’m right here working on my property, I’m not traumatized by my vision loss because I’ve moved on. I’m able to do what I need to do. It’s just that when I’m among society, I’m told I am not really allowed to eat, because we will not give you a job, because you cannot see.”

pocketstar8• 12 years ago

Ive done quite a bit of research on this recently. The device is a microelectrode array (MEA), Id hazard a guess that it started failing after 8 weeks because of glial scaring that isolates the device from the nervous tissue. For those interested I just wrote a paper about these and proposes some solutions to these issues: https://www.dropbox.com/s/93nfqy9luojfwa3/MECH%20450A.rev0.p...

There is a boat load of research going into MEAs these days.

Terr_• 12 years ago

Deus Ex: Human Revolution borrows from some of that current-science for its somewhat-dystopic world of the 2027. People with augments are reliant on Neuropozyne, a drug to prevent scarring and rejection.

T-A• 12 years ago

This kind of implant is commercially available now: http://2-sight.eu/ee/home-ee

mindcrime• 12 years ago

Interesting that your nick is "T-A". Tessier-Ashpool?

0800899g• 12 years ago

bionic eye

Man's high-tech paradise lost: bionic eye removed

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