Ophthalmologists, Physicists Design Bionic Eye

InfallibleLies writes "For the first time ever, those who have been blind since birth will have a chance to see the world. It's still in the early stages, but this is a giant leap forward in medical science." From the linked BBC article: "U.S scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again. It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear. Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret."

Nonvisible wavelenghts?

[bird603568]

Would it be possible to make it "see" infared. Then it would translated it to false color? It would be like the first upgrade in Rouge angent.

From birth?

[puppyfox]

I'm not so sure that people bling from birth will benefit from any such device. That part of their brain is not even developed, you can't just "plug in" some video feed and expect them to see, do you?

a step in the right direction...

[OneOver137]

but it kinda seems like cheatin' with the external camera. I wonder why they couldn't incorporate the simple optical train into the eye directly? The benefit is that you could see in UV, IR, etc. with a camera and software swap.

hmmm.

[sugapablo]

So how long before upgrades make this "bionic eye" significantly better than a human eye?

Will we reach a point where attaching this bionic eye becomes an elective surgery where someone wants to simply improve their eyesight beyond 20/20; beyond what a mere "human" can see?

Breast inlargements, designer babies, bionic implants....where is it all going?

Generations

[Thunderstruck]

My great grandmother could hardly see or hear for years before she died. My grandmother has a cochlear implant and can hear better now than when she could 10 years ago. She says its the single most amazing thing she's experienced, and she experienced everything from the great depression to the Patriot Act.

The interesting question is, what is more important, being able hear and thus communicate with people around you, or being able to see?

Re:From birth?

[puppyfox]

Fact is, the brain keeps developing after the baby is born, so even if you're perfectly normal but blindfolded (or in the dark) for you first few years, you won't be able to ever see "normally". Same goes for some other complex brain functions, like using language. One of those funny facts that stick with you from college classes :)

This is OLD news!

[nilbog]

This news is so old it stinks. They have been expirementing with bionic eyes since the 70's. I remember watching 3,2,1 contact or some such show where they showed a guy with a bionic eye.

This crops up in the news every once in a while but I haven't seen it go anywhere, the artificial eye is never good enough to go into mass usage.

Another variety of eye bionics actually fuses microchips to the eye, but they found that eyes are much to sensitive to be able to withstand the heat generated from the IE chips.

Mental imaging

[liangzai]

Some people who have been blind since birth get very depressed when their vision is medically restored and they see the world as it actually is. It doesn't correspond at all to the colorful paradise their hardware has come up with in lack of sensors.

I guess it's like realizing there is no god after having been brought up in a religious home, or finding out that W. Gates III isn't the saint he has been described to be after filling his pockets for twenty years.

Or maybe it is like Neo finally seeing the rotting world after swallowing the blue pill.

Re:From birth?

[audacity242]

Sort of true, not entirely. How would you explain people who have cochlear implants? By all accounts, those work pretty dang well.

Also, comparing it to language development is a big stretch, vision and language are vastly different, particularly since vision isn't "learned" like language is.

Re:Not for those who have been blind since birth..

[Clod9]

A simple description of visual system development in mammals [harvard.edu] might be interesting to some.

Re:From birth?

[duffahtolla]

No, this is true. Being in the womb is why babies are born with crappy vision. The neural pathways in the brain have not yet formed. As the baby tries to "see" things, the pathways map themselves to the signals. Thats why you can't leave an eye patch on a new born for too long.

This goes on for about 6 to 9 years where vision stops development.

There was a case where a mans vision was restored, (Lost durring childhood) where he simply could not deal with his new vision. He nearly killed himself trying to pick up the "toy" car outside his window. He voluntarily went back to blindness. (I have no references, sorry)

Even the article specifically states: "US scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again."

Re:A little goes a long way

[MagicDude]

Indeed. Your brain can do a lot of interpretation based on just a little input. For example, take this little flash quiz.

[onceuponadime.com] http://www.onceuponadime.com/gold/12pixelheroes.sw f [onceuponadime.com]

I think you'll be surprised at how well you'll do despite having only 12 pixels to identify a superhero's costume. However, I don't think a person who has been blind all his life can make the same interpretations a regular person can. We take for granted how much our brain fills in the gaps of what we can't (or don't) see. A person who hasn't learned to do this would probably have a great deal of difficulty doing this.

Re:Nonvisible wavelenghts?

[Peaked]

If you're talking about seeing heat, that's far spectrum infared. Our eyes can already see bright near spectrum infared, just as we can hear loud subsonics. If you filter out visible light on a bright, sunny day, you can see some infared. Check out http://www.amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html [amasci.com] for a cheap interesting experiment regarding this. I tried it with mild success, I need to play around with it a bit more.

But from what I can tell from the article, anything you can get to show up on some kind of display could probably be outputted to the bionic eyes. Heat vision would just require the same bulky and expensive equipment, just minus the screen. Most of the mass of heat vision infrared goggles comes from cooling the sensor so you can see things other than just the heat from the sensor itself at room temperature.

The false colors in present day heat vision equipment may not be necessary. It would be interesting to see how the brain processed those signals.

Re:From birth?

[RabidMoose]

So as soon as it's apparent that a baby has been born blind, fit them with the eye and glasses. It could be done around the same time a male baby would be circumcised (in the first year), and the child would not only never remember the surgery, but would never remember not being able to see. Of course, I'm no doctor, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Semen does do that to women

[Anonymous Coward]

Now a good excuse/reason to tell the girls
"Have you had your zinc supplement today?"

3 rations sounds good, morning, evening, late evening. :-)

You meant that as a joke, but serious medical studies have found that depressed girls who start swallowing are made less depressive from the semen intake. The hormones and zinc in the ejaculate counteract deficiencies and improve the woman's mood.

Re:Anecdotal evidence

[lightning01]

Actually, there is a scenario they have experimented with. Some people are born with severe cataracts. Surgery can remove those cataracts now, but 20 years ago when they started doing this, they found that if they did not remove the cataracts within a certain amount of time, the brain did not develop sufficiently for eye-sight to be restored. A friend of mine has this problem (she is legally blind). Her daughter was born with the same defect but this time they were able to operate quickly after birth, remove the damaged lenses and replace them with special contacts. When the child is 6 or 7 they will replace the contacts with new lens implants.

Re:Didn't Wired report this in 2002?

[plastik55]

There are several groups working on competing approaches. There are two groups in the US (disclaimer: I work for one) and one in Germany working on the epitetinal electrical stimulation approach; one US group working on a subretinal light-powered device; one US group working on an approach involving light-activated neurotransmitter chemicals, one group in Belgium using an optic nerve "cuff" electrode; a group using cortical stimulation (the main subject of the Wired article); and probably others, not to mention all the work being done on stem cell transplants.

Some of the latest research results in the area have been collected in an issue of the Journal of Neuroengineering. [iop.org]

Re:correlary in Choclear implants

[sharky611aol.com]

Not at all. The idea of a "critical period" is well established in regards to development of vision, hearing, etc. If the neurons in the visual cortex don't receive stimulation from the retina, they die back. For example, if a newborn has uncorrected cataracts in only one eye, they will NEVER be able to see out of that eye, even if the cataracts is fixed at a later date. The intact eye takes over the neural real estate that the other eye would have used. To imply that someone can simply "will" themselves to rewire their brain is completely unsupported by research.

Resolution

[sharky611aol.com]

Ok, this is obviously pretty cool stuff, but what kind of images could you really get with 50-100 "pixels"? We're talking 10x10 resolution here... Hardly enough for face recognition... Or anything really.

Re:Not for those who have been blind since birth..

[monocyte]

Fun neuroplasticity story: In my biomedical engineering seminar we had a professor in who was involved with the development of a laser vision correction system. Their first human tests were safety and basic efficacy studies done in people who were 'brain-blind', meaning that their eyes were fully functional but they had some kind of damage to the visual centers in their brains that left them totally without sight. Oddly enough, following the treatment to their eyes, a number of them regained some proportion of their vision. The explanation? As best as anyone could tell, although they understood when they gave consent that the treatment wouldn't help them, they still unconsciously believed that something had been done... and their brains went along with it, remapping the input from their eyes.

A matter of "taste"

[marcus]

Some have argued that this is the very foundation of "taste". What you see as blue is not the same as what I see as blue. That is why blue is my favorite color and perhaps, not yours.

Same can be said for smells, flavors, girls' figures, etc. All are the same to each of us, yet each of us is different.