Need A New Retina? Look No Further 310
wap writes "Restoring sight to the blind is a Bibical miracle, a sign of divine powers. Now it is being tested at the Boston Retinal Implant Project, with some very limited success, according to Technology Review. They only have fifteen electrodes implanted, but it's a start. Great quotes: 'The eye doesn't like stuff inside it, that's why it doesn't have a zipper.' Will artificial eyes and retinal replacements someday be as good as good human eyes?"
More info (Score:5, Informative)
Brain implant [dobelle.com] anyone?
Only for people who could see at some time (Score:5, Informative)
These devices won't restore eyesight to people who were born blind. Only those who, at one time in their life, actually could see will profit from such technical replacements.
When you are born you are nearly blind. It takes four to six years for the visual cortex to develop fully. After the age of six this development stops and thats the end of it.
If you are born blind then the cortex will not be trained and no magic eye surgery will restore your vision, because after the age of six the visual cortex will no longer adapt to the new situation.
Even if your eyes are restored to 20/20 vision you will not see a thing because your vision center doesn't know how to interpret the pictures. So these kinds of surgery will only help people which went blind and not those who were born blind. (Still cool stuff)
BTW. It is the same with deafness.
Re:Human Augmentation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I must be a Luddite... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I must be a Luddite... (Score:4, Informative)
Usually these effects wear off after a couple of weeks, and some people never experience them at all, but for a minority of patients, they are left with a permanent "starburst" effect, which is worst in any high-contrast light-on-dark situation, such as driving at night.
The problem is serious enough that some governments have banned any person who has had laser eye surgery from driving at all - which is annoying for those who had their vision corrected to bring it into the range acceptable for driving in the first place!
Re:I must be a Luddite... (Score:3, Informative)
It just corrects flaws in the lenses, which should make all types of vision better. Anyone? I'm considering it, that's why I'm interested.
It doesn't "correct flaws in the lenses". It has no effect on the eye's anatomical part called a"lens". Typical near/far sightedness isn't caused by any geometric flaws, but rather by the eye's inability to refocus the "baseline" position of the lens due to skeletal changes forcing geometry changes of the eyeball. Astigmatism is due to corneal flaw in shape but the cornea is still perfect in terms of surface. Contrary to some myths, it is not due to muscle problems, it's that the lens isn't anywhere it needs to be where the muscles can do some good. Laser surgery cuts away at the cornea to change the refractivity of it so that the lens' accomodation range is back in the active area for the optical system consisting of cornea, lens, retina (the same way contact lenses and glasses work).
These cuts cause flaws. In addition, the contrast and reflectivity of the cornea is adversely affected. It is still much better than the older techniques. What some people forget is that laser surgery is still surgery. It is still butchery, its just that the laser is relatively more precise and allows smaller scale cuts than a knife.
useful but not great (Score:3, Informative)
There is absolutely no equal to the organic material of the eye, though. As good as the implant is, it's still like looking at a bad reprint of a picture.
When it comes to the human body, third party products are decent if you can't get the real thing. But, they really aren't (and probably won't be) better.
Re:Only for people who could see at some time (Score:2, Informative)
BTW, Why is this just making news here, now? I saw a spot on CNN probably a year ago or more about a guy that was blind, but had stuff implanted into his brain and a little camera to allow him to see... It's still really cool, but it isn't really new.
Re:As good??? (Score:2, Informative)
Adding another 3 colors would expand the edge handling required from 3 colors, and the resulting 2+1 = 3 differentials, to 5+4+3+2+1= 15 differentials to resolve. Forget it, it's too complex to easily manage and doesn't really buy you much additional resolution of real objects that isn't present in RGB.
Not Analog, Optical. (Score:1, Informative)
When you zoom an OPTICAL LENS, you're still working with the original subject matter (light), and you haven't really degraded what you want to sample. Just the opposite. But if you don't zoom the original optical image, instead sampling it at low quality, and then expect to magically use digital technology to make low quality data into high quality data, then obviously, you'll be disappointed.
On the other hand, if you make a DIGITAL, OPTICAL LENS, it would quite possibly be better than analog lenses, but no one has invented such a thing yet.
Re:You mean DIGITAL zoom (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that the f/2 is the minimum sampling rate to be able to caputer a signal, in most cases that will NOT provide all the spectral info needed. Think of a sign wave, if you hit it just right you would see a flat line with f/2 sampling. Often for GOOD reproduction you need to sample more then 2x withing the period of the wave, often times 10x is much better.
Re:As good??? (Score:2, Informative)
On the other hand, the human eye has pretty good resolution in the point of best vision, something like an arc minute. At the same time, it offers motion detection over a rather large arc. This allows you to notice something happening at the edge of your field of vision.
Let us assume for a moment that you want to emulate these features with a "standard" CCD that has a uniform resolution over its surface. The field of vision shall be 90 degrees horizontally. You would then need a resolution of 90*60 by (let's assume the traditional 4:3 ratio) 90*45 pixels.
That would be a 5400x4050 pixel CCD. AFAIK such CCDs do exist, but at a size that would not fit into a human eye.
Considering noise, most of today's cameras still need a flash or a floodlight to make decent pictures at night. So add some low-light amplification to your CCD, if you want to compete with the human eye
Bottom line:
Technology has to improve some more before it can give better results than a human eye from an eyeball-sized camera.
A few retinal implant details (Score:2, Informative)
It will likely not be as good as normal vision for a *very* long time, if ever; it is meant to return some mobility and possibly face and detail recognition to people who have gone blind by retinal degeneration.
Furthermore, this is not a "cure" for these diseases. The rods and cones still die, but are "replaced" by an external camera and some implanted circuits and electrodes to stimulate the retinal nerves which form the optic nerve.
In response to those asking whether this is new: it's not. Most of the groups working on artificial vision (retinal implants, cortical implants, optic nerve implants) have been at it for well over a decade. What is new is the development by some of these groups of actual implantable devices, as shown in the Technology Review article. Previous experiments typically involved electrodes inserted into the eye of a blind volunteer for a short time, with all of the electronics remaining outside.
Re:Only for people who could see at some time (Score:3, Informative)
I know because there are other conditions which, to some extend, lead to the same phenomenon. If you are suffering from strabismus or nystagmus since birth the same could happen to you. If you suffer from strabismus then you get diplopic images since right and left eye are not parallel.
The brain cannot cope with this kind of double vision because it cannot combine the two images (from the left and right eye) to form a threedimensional image.
So the brain ignores the image from the weaker of the two eyes and the part of the visual cortex, which processes the images from this eye will no longer be used.
This leads to bad vision which cannot be corrected with glasses or lasik since its the visual cortex who cannot correctly process the data.
If this remains untreated to the age of six or seven you will never recover your vision. Due to strabismus and nystagmus the vision of my right eye is only at 5% so i am a good example of that myself.
A popular treatment for this is to use eyepatches. You disable perception from the better eye and force the brain to use the weaker one so that this part of the visual cortex will also be trained. But this treatment has to start when you are still young for it to have any effect.
HTH
Jeff
p.s. i hope i have explaned it correctly since i am not a native speaker (Had to look up some words in the dictionary)
Re:Quote (Score:2, Informative)
Arthur C. Clarke (Famous author of: 2001, Childhoods End, Songs of Distant Earth, and many others)
The quote you're discribing the third of Clarkes Three Laws[1] first published in an essay titled "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", in Profiles of the Future
There is also a corollary to the third law that states any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced (Gregory Benford [2] first proposed this in Foundation's Fear[3])
Hope that Helps.
References:
[1] Clarke's Three Laws, Wikipedia.org [wikipedia.org]
[2] Gregory Benford, Wikipedia.org [wikipedia.org]
[3] Foundation's Fear, Wikipedia.org [wikipedia.org]
Sight to Blind (Score:2, Informative)