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Artificial Retinas Bring Vision Back To The Blind

Posted by timothy on Sat May 07, 2005 02:44 PM
from the no-corneal-humor-please dept.
Biotech Science
Patters writes "Researchers from the University of California and the Doheny Eye Institute have successfully implanted a tiny electronic eye implant with a video camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses into 6 patients, allowing them to detect light and motion. The implant is a 4-by-4 grid of electrodes which connects to damaged photoreceptors (rods and cones) on the patient's retina. It works by stimulating the photoreceptors, transmitting signals through the optic nerve to the brain. The implant only works on patients with degenerated rods and cones, and is named after Argus, the Greek god which had 100 eyes. If the implants continue to be a success, the artificial retinas could be available to the public within the next 3 years."
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  • Obvious transhuman consequences left out (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Eunuch (844280) * on Saturday May 07 2005, @02:46PM (#12463524)
    Transhumanism is like libertarianism--an obvious solution invisible to the mainstream. Hey, I don't want blind spots. I consider them to make me disabled. And to fix that I want completely artificial eyes.
    • You'll need an artificial brain as well. Most of what you "see" is really brain processing. Simply increasing the resolution of the camera won't help. 360 vision sounds neat, but your brain won't be able to cope without making other concessions.

      Granted, being able to focus on something 200 yards away the size of a needle would be awesome. But don't think this is a panacea for everyone.
      • I think you underestimating the ability of the brain to adapt to different input. Besides you don't necessarily need implants to have 360 degree vision, or a long zoom lens - it could be a helmet-mounted camera/monitor system. Implants would just make it more portable.

        • Re:Obvious transhuman consequences left out (Score:5, Interesting)

          by MyLongNickName (822545) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:30PM (#12463798) Journal
          I think you misunerstand my post. Look at folks who have never had sight. Studies have shown that other parts of the brain begin to use the "dead space" that would have been dedicated to vison. I don't think it is unreasonale to expect that you COULD get super sight.... but something else would suffer as a result.

          The brain is a very amazing creation. However, it isn;t sitting around with 90% unused capacity as is the common old wives tail. Make vision better, something else must suffer.
      • Actually, the blind spots are an artifact of the physical construction of the human eye. It's where your nerves leave the eyeball.
    • Transhumanism is like libertarianism

      You mean it's an unworkable fantasy dreamed up by conservatives who smoke pot?

      Sounds about right to me.

      • Re:Obvious transhuman consequences left out (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Valar (167606) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:35PM (#12463820)
        The funny thing about libertarians is that they are dismissed by both sides of the political spectrum.

        Libertarian: I think people ought to be able to do anything with their personal lives, just as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.
        Republican: OMG?! What if they smoke drugs and make gay-like?
        Libertarian: Companies are just lots of people. So they ought to be able to do just about anything that doesn't hurt anyone else.
        Democrat: OMG?! They'll enslave us all!!!!! (ignoring the important clause about do no evil)
      • This would be worthy of an insightful mod, if you had the guts to log in when you posted. It is true that folks like to look at external reason for their inadequacies instead of looking in the mirror (pun unintentional). However, when the poster isn't willing to put one's own karma on the line, it just doesn't have the same effect.

      • Re:Obvious transhuman consequences left out (Score:4, Informative)

        by The Only Druid (587299) on Saturday May 07 2005, @04:57PM (#12464225)
        "You might get it to work if you implanted them in an infant, but that would be kind of rough having to buy new eyes frequently during periods of rapid growth."

        No, you'd never have to buy new ones: newborns arrive with eyeballs the same size as an adult. That's why children seem to have such large eyes: their skull is smaller than an adult, but they have the same size eyes. The only large-scale change to your eyes over the years is a slight shift in flexibility of different tissues (resulting in various vision issues), excluding serious degenerative issues.

  • 4 x 4? (Score:5, Funny)

    by blue_adept (40915) on Saturday May 07 2005, @02:47PM (#12463531)
    wow, and I thought 640 x 480 was low resolution.
    • If you go to their website [2-sight.com]and check out the graphics it's kind of depressing really. To me this is really low tech stuff.

      • So? It's better than nothing...take hearing: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lxt (724570) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:19PM (#12463734) Journal
        It really is better than nothing - take cochlear implants. Nobody who recieves an implant (which works) complains about the quality of the sound produced...and it really is far removed from what we hear (imagine everything sounding like it was being spoken by Daleks, and you'll get the picture).

        As with all technologies, you'd expect the resolution to improve over time - in the case of cochlear implants, sound quality has improved with increased numbers of electrodes being used in the cochlear, and the size of speech processors has been reduced to the point where they now look like typical hearing aids.

        However, I'd imagine surgery wise, although it can be extremely complicated to insert a cochlear implant (especially if the cochlear itself is deformed), it's a hell of a lot easier to upgrade / repair a damaged implant than it would be to upgrade / repair a retinal implant.
    • Ah, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
    • I think it probably has to do with a combination of problems. Firstly, the requirements for electronics suitible for implant are fairly high. I mean, a digital camera ccd would probably just burn your face continously. Unpleasant. And, if this is powered by bioelectrics, then it as to meet low power requirements.

      Issue two might be even bigger. I am no neuroscientist, but I bet the time it takes the brain to 'learn' the signal is a steeply positive function of resolution.

    • Re:4 x 4? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by shimmin (469139)
      I've seen a video clip of a person using the implant. He was an older man who had originally been sighted, but had lost his vision several decades ago. An object was placed in front of him on a table, and he proceeded to move his head around in a circular pattern, kind of like a bird doing some sort of mating display. I think this motion multiplied the effective resolution of the device, giving him a better sense of where the object's boundaries were than if he'd held his head still.

      After about 20 secon

  • remember everyone (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UlfGabe (846629) on Saturday May 07 2005, @02:49PM (#12463543) Journal
    people blind from birth will not be able to use this to see. Their brains havn't even developed the "code" to interpret the optic nerve signals.

    people who have lost eyes, or through macular degeneration, will be able to regain some of their lost visual freedom.

    excellent work scientists, keep it up.
    • people who have lost eyes, or through macular degeneration, will be able to regain some of their lost visual freedom.

      Not if the optic nerve has been severed and they have a prosthetic eye. The retina must still be in place as well.

      There is almost no point in having people who have lost one eye do this anyways. Living with one eye is not that bad.

      Macular degeneration is where this really counts.

    • Re:remember everyone (Score:5, Informative)

      by kebes (861706) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:11PM (#12463673) Journal
      You are absolutely right. Many experiments have shown that if vision is impaired during certain critical developmental periods, then normal vision will never be possible, even if their eyes work perfectly. (The work began with Hubel [wikipedia.org] and Wiesel's [wikipedia.org] work on kittens, for which they received the 1981 Nobel Prize in medicine, but has been extended by many others.) These experiments have even shown that you can limit vision in certain ways (blocking out only one part of a visual field, for instance, or letting them mature in an environment devoid of a particular class of visual cue) and the animal will simply have that part of their visual system undeveloped (while other parts still work).

      So there is no way that those born without vision will ever attain what we consider normal vision. That having been said, it may be possible that they can achieve some rudimentary visual capabilities. For instance, they may learn to use the stimulus from a 4X4 grid in order to help them know when objects are approaching, or to better interpret their other senses. It isn't much, but for someone who has been blind their whole life, even some vague visual information (like knowing how bright their surroundings are!) may be helpful. Obviously more research is necessary in order to know if even these limited abilities can be learned later in life.

    • Re:remember everyone (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      people blind from birth will not be able to use this to see. Their brains havn't even developed the "code" to interpret the optic nerve signals.

      Hopefully scientists will be able to find a way of stimulating the areas of the brain to develop this "code".

      Then the people blind from birth will be able to sing I can see clearly now my brain has grown.

      SCNR.

      • How about having a computer interpret the scene and use the 4x4 field to display direct codes to them? There are 16^2 possible codes with a 4x4 black/white pixel screen (assuming each pixel is either on or off).

      • Re:remember everyone (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Dachannien (617929) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:59PM (#12463964)
        One thing that happens during early infant brain development - when the low-level brain facilities for vision are also developing - is the mass culling of synaptic connections. That is, the brain initially grows (during late prenatal development) an abundance of synapses, far more than it needs for normal operation. A large portion of these synapses are removed during early childhood (first two years or so), with learning and experience creating a "survival of the fittest" scheme of determining which synapses to keep and which to lose.

        It is almost certain that the excessive culling of synapses in the visual centers of the brain that results from not having any visual stimulus during the first two years of life is irreversible. Possibly the brain could be stimulated to produce new synapses in those areas, but it is likely that the process would cause far more harm than good.

    • Re:remember everyone (Score:4, Informative)

      by BWJones (18351) * on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:18PM (#12463728) Homepage Journal
      OK, so like the other posters have said, there is considerable processing that occurs in the brain. However, most people are not aware of how much visual processing actually occurs in the retina. Hint: it is considerable.

      As for the results that Humayan et al are showing to great effect, there are major problems aside from the engineering ones. First off, part of my PhD dissertation [utah.edu] was on just this problem of retinal degeneration. It turns out that the implants they are designing are not taking into account some of the most basic issues of biology. Notably that any time you deafferent a CNS system, it remodels. They will have to deal with remodeling and continuously degenerating retina. In order for implants like this to work, we need to arrest retinal remodeling or take advantage of it to enable wiring into bionic or artificial biological circuits.

      From an engineering standpoint, traditional electrode grids like this will end up with other problems. Notably, the issue of heating. You don't want to cook your retinas, so the need for very small currents with microelectrodes are what will be necessary. I show one such bionic implant on my blog here [utah.edu].

    • ...not totally true (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lxt (724570) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:22PM (#12463748) Journal
      I don't think this is totally the case.

      Having some experience with cochlear implants, I can tell you children who are born completely deaf - ie, have never heard sound in their life - often adapt (over time) to cochlear implants.

      However, most adults cannot do this - the brain of an infant obviously is under constant development, and so can learn how to "hear" far more easily than a totally deaf adult.

      • Re:...not totally true (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yes, you are right. I'm a cochlear implant recipicent. I got my CI when I was 3 in 1989. I can hear and know the sounds fine.

        But adults are a completely different story. They might be able to hear, but they might not be able to "learn" sound discrimination. An example of this is being able to tell the difference between low frequency and high frequency sounds necessary for speech discrimination. Of course, I was implanted early so I just ingrained that information naturally. An adult-implanted person will

      • Re:remember everyone (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mikael (484) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:25PM (#12463760)
        Not really. Human vision develops at the early stage, at the same time as we learn to crawl along as infants. There was once a case where some parents tried "accelerate" their kids development, by skipping the crawling stage, and just using a baby bouncer instead. Apparently, the kid never learnt the concepts of "perspective" and "distance". as a consequence, she couldn't understand why objects changed in size.

        There was also a guy in a 3rd world country who had cataracts since he was born. Doctors managed to help him see again, but he could only see colours, but not shapes. He still had to touch the object to get the idea of its shape.

        There are so many aspects of vision that we have to learn in order to avoid becoming confused: shadows, reflections, texture, shape from shadow, perspective, not forgetting spacial relationships (partially obscured, behind, inside).
        • Actually it is not uncommon for children to skip the crawling stage by themselves. I know I did.

          It is not recommended, but not because you loose perspective or distance, but because your will have poorer coordination between arms and legs.

  • Does it use Linux? (Score:4, Funny)

    by snutte (554053) on Saturday May 07 2005, @02:51PM (#12463556) Homepage
    If it runs on Linux im willing to poke an eye out just to get one! :D
  • Let the Geordi jokes begin!
  • It would be better to grow brand new biological eyes (compatible with the intended recipients DNA), and have those implanted rather than electo-mechanical solutions. One key advantage among many being that such replacements could actually grow with the person, and recipients would not be limited to adults.
    • A bit like it would be better to just teleport people than going with your typical airline?

      It's hard enough to grow some kinds of human cells, and growing them in an orderly fashion to get the exactness necessary for something like normal vision, is very far away right now. I think it's quite likely that an artificial implant with a good interface will be a good-enough, or even better-than-original solution.

    • ...actually, eyes don't grow at all. They might enlarge by at the most a few millimetres during very early life, and don't grow at all after about 5 years of age.

  • Alternatives... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lxt (724570) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:15PM (#12463706) Journal
    ...it's probably worth pointing out the research already done in various other areas - I believe a few months ago the Univeristy of Wisconsin completed a test whereby a grid of electrodes was placed on the tongue of a blind person, who wore a head mounted camera - light intensity would trigger impulses sent to the grid. Apparantly one of the subjsects even managed to navigate around a maze using it. I'm sure a /. story was posted about it...

    But even this was based on previous research - I remember about similar experiments done in the late 1980s, albeit on a far lower resolution and using a extremely pad of electrodes mounted on the chest.

  • No news here. (Score:4, Informative)

    by qualico (731143) <kevin@qualico.ca> on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:16PM (#12463714) Homepage Journal
    *sigh* This story has been around for years. Here is a better resolution version from 2000: Artifical Retinas [mdsupport.org]
  • Technology like this will take off when we can make flexible circuitry that can conform to the inner surface of the retina in a moving eyeball. The ultimate artificial retina would have a photosensitive array on one surface and a nerve-stimulating grid on the other surface. A small transducer coil elsewhere on the body would provide power to the unit.

    Finding a new elastomeric polymer with conductive/semi-conductive properties (think stretchy OLED polymers) would help make this happen. Or perhaps blen
  • Error in the posting -- this work was done at USC (University of Southern California), which isn't part of the UC (University of California, the umbrella term for the public university system in California). Oh, and to pre-empt the followups, UC is also the University of Chicago and the University of Cincinnati, among others ... but not the University of Colorado, which calls itself CU to avoid this name overloading problem :-)
  • When someone who has been blind for their whole life sees for the first time, with a device that you and your team designed?

    THIS is the true value of science.
    • I've actually been in a room during a cochlear implant switch-on...it's not as dramatic as you'd think. I'd imagine the same would be true for this type of experiment - it's not like they can instantly hear perfectly, since they don't know what "sound sounds like".

  • AGAIN!!! (Score:3, Informative)

    by NeedleSurfer (768029) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:47PM (#12463892)
    These [slashdot.org] inventions [slashdot.org] seems [slashdot.org] to [slashdot.org] appear [slashdot.org] often [slashdot.org] here [slashdot.org]

    But rarely in real life...

  • Anyone else thinking what you could do with this?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by V_drive (522339) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:52PM (#12463928)
    How about:

    - A jack that accepts video signal from a computer for work or GAMING
    - Backward or otherwise mounted cameras at all times giving "rear view" (eyes in the back of your head!) appearing off to the side of the main image
    - Your personal HUD! News, stock ticker, email, personal alerts and reminders, responding to voice activated commands
    - Night vision or infrared
    - Television receiver with subtitles
    - Zooming lenses

    Okay, none of that will be helpful with 4x4 res, but think of the possibilities for future use!

    Then again, think of the pranks you could pull on someone by splicing it.
  • What would be the 'resolution' of the human eye? I think its gotta be in the range of maybe 5000*5000 to 10,000*10,000. But maybe its higher. I know I read a cool story by Greg Egan about transferring your mind into a computer and how the visual data was generated by raytracing backwards from the simulated retina, one ray per cell just like how its one ray per pixel. But I wondered at the time how many rays that was.

  • Argus NOT a Greek God (Score:4, Informative)

    by Danuvius (704536) on Saturday May 07 2005, @05:16PM (#12464291)
    Argus is a *giant*, not a God, in greek mythology.

    He did have 100 eyes though. "He was thus a very effective watchman, as only a few of the eyes would sleep at a time; there were always eyes still awake.", as the Wikipedia notes [wikipedia.org]

  • Scientific American Frontiers on PBS (Score:3, Informative)

    by Orp (6583) on Saturday May 07 2005, @07:08PM (#12464861) Homepage
    Scientific American Frotntiers, the PBS science show hosted by Alan Alda, recently did a segment on this technology [pbs.org] and how it worked for a man who was blinded as an adult. The other segment was on a deaf girl who received a cochlear implant.

    • panning your head (Score:5, Interesting)

      by goombah99 (560566) on Saturday May 07 2005, @03:07PM (#12463661)
      In principle one pixel would be enough, if you could pan your head and remember what you saw at each pixel. With 16 pixels this is simplified. Your 4096x1024 pixel scanner on your desktop does not have 4 mllion sensors, it has just 1/4000th of that number: 1024 and it uses them in a pushbroom fashion. Those 360 degree pan cameras also just use a narrow slit they push broom. Same with many sattelites.

      the question is whether your brain is up to of synthesizing a image from a pan and deconvolving the large pixels down to high resolution. There's some evidence it might be able to synthesize the image from the pan since it already does that for your blind spot. And the ganglia in the eyeball do some deconvolution already so that might be possible too.

      I guess we'll find out when the blind people tell us.

    • HUGE difference. And USC is NOT "Southern Cal". It drives me up the wall when people say that (sports announcers do it all the time).

      "Cal" is a name given to UC Berkeley because it was the first university in California (1868). A person listing the UC's would say "UCSB, UCLA, UCSC, Cal, UCSD..."

      University of Southern California was founded 12 years after UC Berkeley. Other than being in the same conference (Pac10), the schools have no affiliation with each other. USC is a private school. Cal is publ

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