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Silicon Retinal Implants Are Here
Ant was one of the first to write with this news: "CHICAGO -- Illinois scientists said Friday they have successfully implanted
silicon microchips beneath human retinas for the first time, a procedure that holds promise for millions of people with failing eyesight. Earlier this week, three patients who lost almost all of their vision from retinitis pigmentosa -- a hereditary condition in which the retina gradually degenerates -- became the first people to have an Artificial Silicon Retina implanted."
>I've done some implant work and talked with some >of the engineers who worked on retinal implants. >The implant goes in front of the photoreceptors. >Of course. It cannot fit behind.
So it goes in front of the photoreceptors but behind the two nerve layers that are overlaid upon them? Or does it sit atop the retina itself, directly stimulating ganglion w/o the benefit of the horizontal/amacrine/bipolar cells?
--Dan
The technology was featured at least twice before on Slashdot, and I saw it in a documentry over a year ago.
Here's one of them, I can't find the better ones:
I have to wonder if it will even help with retina detachments, the nerve endings wouldn't be there to interface with... it seems to be limited to helping people with perfect eyes, and degenerating retinas.
So maybe some absolutely miniscule fraction of the poplulation can have blurry monochrome 60x60 pixel vision restored to them. Hopeless for reading... it might be good for navigating sidewalks with a cane.
This will probably surprise you, but 3,500 receptors is about what the human eye has. I'm not joking. Maybe I'm off by a bit, but that's about the figure. We see with such incredible resolution because our brain puts together lots of information in several different ways, and as long as we see something for more than a half second, the brain can gather enough information to create a high-quality mental image of what we're actually seeing in very poor resolution.
No, I don't know how it works. I just know that it does.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Or better yet set the things up so you can "beam" stuff into a data port, so you can watch stunning 3d movies just like you were there, and you can watch it privately, to boot. 'Course, the cops'll all have little widgets they can just zap you with, leaving you blind until they arrest you. So many possibilities, so many possible abuses.
--
This is not my sandwich.
I'm no Luddite, but I'm not too thrilled about the idea of making permanent modifications to my body. (Especially if those modifications replace existing organs.)
I see a simpler solution: Tiny LCDs in contact lenses. The could be used with the eyes open, acting as a kind of HUD, or with the eyes closed, with some sort of backlight.
We could practically do this today, couldn't we?
MSK
"Overclocking Eyeballs With Liquid Nitrogen"
"Decided that your 3400x2700 27" flatscreen monitor isn't giving you the best possible Q5 Arena experience? These two did."
"By hooking up a direct feed from the motherboard, and submerging their own eyeballs in liquid nitrogen, they were able to acheive a maximum resolution of 5700x4200, with 180 fps framerate! We need a beowulf cluster of these linked up to Natalie Portman immediately!"
Score -1 (Off-rocker)
I was arguing with a med student about a month ago about the possibility of robotic eyes. He was dead-set in the belief that it wasn't possible.
I'm fully aware that this isn't exactly it either, but it's close enough for what we were arguing about. How long until I get to shoot lethal concentrated laser beams from my eyes? :-P
Here are links to the Retinal Implant Project which was a joint Harvard-MIT collaboration. Another link here(in German)leads to the page of German researchers on the same project. Here's an article that describes the project in a little detail.
Interesting project, it seems they've been working on this for 10 or more years in joint collaboration with several universities in different countries as well as the government.
Whoops... Correction. The old one required external prosthetics.
Game Boy has a 1 MHz Z80-compatible CPU, four audio channels, and a display with 160x144 pixels that can be set to any of four brightness levels (Game Boy; Game Boy Pocket) or any of 32,768 colors (Game Boy Color).
Will I retire or break 10K?
And there's also been the headlines recently about that plastic surgeon that placed breast implants into the ass of some women that wanted a bigger but. What's next, installing optical implants into someone's ass?
kwsNI
So it goes in front of the photoreceptors but behind the two nerve layers that are overlaid upon them? Or does it sit atop the retina itself, directly stimulating ganglion w/o the benefit of the horizontal/amacrine/bipolar cells?
Outside all retinal layers. Amacrine, horizontal, and bipolar cells are not really figured in. Ganglion cells are the target.
wired mag predicted this 2 years ago in an article entitled "Tomorrow Today". Not bad. they predicted solar cell artificial retinas in y2k.
Just 3500 microscopic solar cells?! That means a resolution of about 59 x 59...! Oh well... it's a start anyhow..
- cfelde
Ahh :) Does this mean I soon can get my X-Ray vision?! ;)
- cfelde
Or perhaps hackers figure out nifty ways to broadcast at some odd frequency, whatever, to disrupt the chips, and we all go blind -- the world goes to hell?
Yep, I think it's pretty clear: we're all going to die now.
having pretty horrible vision myself, this surgery all sounds very interesting. my optomitrest recently commented that my eyesight was getting worse more quickly than anyone's he'd ever seen before-- this bothered me. so what i'm left to wonder is, how much will this damned surgery cost? because i'm sure my insurance will find a way around paying for it... and when that happens, will only the very rich be able to afford good eyesight???
i feel as if right now i am at a defecit to the seeing population of the world... what happens when the rich people are the only ones who can afford to "fix" their bodies so they function properly???
grizzo: totally insecure, but very convenient.
This has some pretty cool implications for virtual reality: if scientists can figure out how to hook into the vision nerves, and this looks like a great start, we could soon "plug in" matrix style (although hopefully without the agonising pain) to external visual inputs.
The implant itself, while the benificiaries seem to be from only one kind of eye problem for the time being, seems to be an indicator of a coming rush of "bionic" implants that will change the way humans live, or at least wealthy humans. I seem to remember reading many science fiction books that project this future...
I for one am looking forward to reading slashdot by subvocalising (Andrew Wiggan style) a command to the implanted screen in my eye, and seeing it as a "full screen" 3d panoramic view, where the full screen is just that... an all encompassing virtual view.
tsf.
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Oh, never mind I just imagined it and it wasn't that exciting...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
It's a photoelectric cell that generates electrical stimulation similar to the kind that a retina would on being struck by light. This is NOT a microchip. There is no processing or logic involved.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The retinal scanners would send a message to the vision chip, and the vision chip would detect it and radio its serial number to the scanner.
Will I retire or break 10K?
the fact that a Borg character is /.'s icon for Microsoft stories.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Can't wait to be a borg... ;-)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Silicon Implants seem to be poping up everywhere...
First the Chest, now the eyes, geez.
CHICAGO - Pamela Anderson Lee is the first of a line of celebrities to have the latest and greatest silicon implants installed. Apparently she feels insecure about the sides of her retinas. Pamela declined to comment, but a rather baffled scientist at the institute was quoted: "What kind of crack is she smoking?"
And they're off... Its (0: Troll), no, now its (1: Funny), how will it end?
true true, but there is another effect at work here, you brain has a strange effect on image processing, you have to remember that you are not processing stills but actually motion video, the brain can take partial video information over a period of time and stitch it together to tell you what you are looking at. it really dosen't help the initial crappy quality you'll see but you should be able to read.
Take a digital movie and compress the **** out of it, ok any one frame is unreadable, now watch the movie, though irratating you definately see whats going on (for the most part).
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
From the story:
"The chip contains about 3,500 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. "
Now, by my maths that would give the eye a "resolution" of about 60x60 pixels. And that's assuming that it's black and white rather than colour that the implant allows viewing in. If it is in colour, assuming one receptor for each of Red/Green/Blue, you're down to about 34x34. I don't know about you, but with that sort of vision resolution I'd just about be able to tell light levels and maybe buildings, if the ywere big/near enough. It's not quite up to human-style vision or even something which can be useful for any particular task other than "seeing" big objects.
Also, someone further down the thread mentioned using these combined with microchips to correct for other deficiancies of the eye, such as short-sightedness. How? The details have already been lost. Additional lenses on the outside of the eye are used to prevent the loss of the detail, not to fill it in again. Try this:
Take a digital photo, any digital photo and load it into you favourite image editor. Now scale it down to 10% of its previous size, and scale that back up again. The image will be blurred, and there won't be any way of getting that lost detail back no matter how hard you tell it to interpolate from the shrunken image.
In short, even if these things did have a good resolution, they wouldn't be useful for the things people have been suggesting.
--
Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
There's more to vision than a functioning eye. The brain's got to know what to do with it! I've had severe amblyopia in my left eye for most of my life.. not really a retinal problem, but the doc told me that even if I underwent surgery to correct the physical problem, the chances of the nerve connections regenerating are slim. If the condition that this chip is treating is the result of a gradual degeneration of the retina, wouldn't the nerve connections gradually degenerate as well? Guess we'll have to wait and "see" how this procedure works out..
seanmeister
"eye" Macs.. iMacs...get it....?
groooooan...
seanmeister
The article states that this procedure is only for retinitis pigmentosa, but in the end, it is not a treatment for RP, but an early biocompatibility test. RP is only a useful physiological test bed that renders the patient blind over large areas of the retina, while leaving most of the retinal structure intact. The patient was undoubtedly a research volunteer, and was aware of all this, and should probbaly more properly be coinsdered a 'subject' (but I hate calling patients that).
.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html
As you probably recall from elementary school, there are two types of receptors in the eye. Rods handle B/W vision, are more sensitive to light, and are responsible for night and peripheral vision. Cones handle color vision, and are only found in the central areas of the visual field, especially the area of best vision in the eye, fovea centralis. (not to be confused with a nearby region of *no* vision, the macula lutea or 'blind spot' where the optic nerve enters the retina). Simple layman diagrams and links to useful concepts (but not *absolutely* accurate) can be found at:
http://hyperphysics.p hy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html
http://hyperphysics
Here's a good anatomical overview of the eye
RP is a group of genetic diseases which cause the rods to degenerate. about ten different mutation have been linked to forms of RP, which can be dominant, recessive, or X-linked. Initially, the patient loses their peripheral vision, beginning in a single region, then gradually spreading. The fovea centralis is the last region to be affected, if ever, because there are few rods in the fovea. It is not clear if loss of sharp central vision is due to 'pure' RP at all, since mutations in some 'RP' genes can cause macular degenerations or other retinal conditions. It appears that the loss of central vision is dependent on the individual's particular mutation.
The retina is laid out in layers, and in very different way that you might imagine. The photo sensors are in the *back* of the retina, and in front of them are several layers of neurons that allow the sensors to integrate (share info between nearby sensors, etc) and in front of that are the blood vessels a snd the neurons that go from the interneurons into the optic nerve, etc. Light passes through all these layers before hitting the rod and cone sensors. The only things that are 'behind' the sensors are the pigmented (choroid) layer, a black layer that absorbs all leftover light to keep it from bouncing around the eye; and the sclera, the tough "white of the eye" that provides support.
[Slides and images]
[Good slide, exlanations, links, but a bit technical]
So why use this implant in RP? Well, by prying apart the layers of the retina as described, the sensors can be placed where the cones used to be, and with a bit of luck, the overlying layers of interconnecting neurons will remain intact (they are presumably unaffected by the rod-destroying mutations, since 'cone' vision is preserved in RP) All this is done in the periphery of the eye, away from the delicate Fovea and macula. Here it can be tested, through the (largely) intact eye, without significantly affecting the patient's remaining natural vision (though there's always some risk)
This implant links into the web of interneurons in the retina, instead of having to be connected to the optic nerve as the native rods and cones do. You can see how this is easier than trying to do delicate neurosurgery on the optic nerve, and then re-training the patient's visual cortex. This is the most 'natural' process for th patient, since all position info is preserved and the preprocessing of the retina is present (ther preprocessing has two purposes: feedback to nearby sensors, which is lost in man-made sensors, and pre-processing of the visual impulses, which is preserved)
However, a low resolution 'pinhead' sensor on the periphery won't help an RP patient at all. In fact, patients sometimes find patchy remnants of peripheral vision distracting and annoying. Clearly this is not a treatment for RP but an early stage biocompatibility test for later work (that is more likely to be useful in other conditions).
Here's a review article on progress and challenges in similar subretinal implant technologies
(Disclaimer: I published some research on retinal layers as an undergrad, but that was almost 20 years ago, and before I went to medical school)
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Among (far too many) other interests, human perception is a major fascination of mine. I had the good fortune to take a perception class last quarter, and we studied much of how the visual system functions. Here's a bit of what's going on:
Most of vision is not, in fact, provided by the whole of the retina. The fovea, which is (optimally) the direct point of focus for light reaching the back of the eye, is also about the size of a pinhead--yet, it contains about half of our photoreceptors. We actually see very little of a scene at any given time; our eyes essentially "paint the fovea" with a strip of images in normal viewing and jitter around for focused viewing, such that the brain has a large amount of content to stitch together and the photoreceptors/neurons don't tire from lack of signal change.
We filter out constant signals automatically, like the hum of your PC you just noticed when I brought it up.
What my major concern is, I can't particularly figure out where this implantation is taking place, in terms of thickness. The nerves that actually carry the visual system through the optic nerve to the striate cortex are in front of, not behind, the existing photoreceptors. You've got two layers of nerves sitting in front of the photoreceptors, and they're placing the chip behind? This makes me wonder whether they're trying to stimulate or amplify existing photoreceptor activity--which leads to all sorts of questions regarding intensity, variance, signal matching, and so on. Did they solve the electrical potential problem? Supposedly you can't interface an electrode with a nervous system for too long, or you kill the nerve. Maybe the size of the implant helps here too--it's not impossible to imagine that this little fleck of a chip is being placed among photoreceptors?
Does anybody know more about this system? I'm getting really burnt on stories about interesting tech with no quality links. *sigh*
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Here's the original press release: /depts/paff/opa/releases/retinas_advisory.html
http://www.uic.edu
And the company mentioned in the PR, Optiobionics, has a FAQ (which addresses questions of resolution and perception quality for potential patients... in short, they're not sure yet, but it won't be all that great) here.
:wq
Optobionics rather... grrr *gets daily caffeine supplement*
:wq