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End To Blindness?
Kevin writes "For the first time ever, researchers from a company called Optobionics surgically implanted an artificial retina into three patients who are blind from retinitis pigmentosa. These highly-experimental prosthetic devices, made of silicone computer chips, are intended to restore ambulatory vision, thereby giving people the freedom to walk without the assistance of a cane or guide dog.
Researchers are begining to develop computer chips that might function in place of
damaged photoreceptor cells."
It's the year 2000, and people STILL can't get this right?
..isn't silicone used in other, more uh, cosmetic prosthesies? You mean silicon, I hope...
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I heard that when they restore people's vision after they were blind their entire life, formerly blind people still can't "see" very well. The signals might be going to your brain again but it will take a while for your brain to figure out how to make sense of it all. This is better than nothing but if you really want to cure blindness you have to do it to very young people so they can learn how to use their eyes like everyone else.
As I understand it, not much. I saw something very similar to this a few months ago, but the new retina consisted of about 6 pixels, which were wired directly into the optic nerve. They were triggered when the wearer was close to something, or when confronted by a bright object.
Now, although the resolution isn't great, it's a hell of a lot better than nothing - the patient they tested it on could distinguish some objects, and tell when he was close to walls and stuff.
The big difference though, was that the retina was external, mounted on his forehead, I think, but it still wired into his optic nerve, which was the important advance.
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And here all this time i've been drooling over the microoptical glasses mount display, Why bother when I can have a chip implanted into my eyeball and just use the hardware to directly superimpose an image on my field of vision.
I shudder to think how much the R&D costs for this are. 80% of all blindness is preventable with current techniques. The most common cause, cataracts, can be cured with a relatively simple operation Trachoma, the second most common cause, can easily be prevented with proper hygiene, and cured with inexpensive antibiotics. The third most common cause, glaucoma, is more difficult to treat, but vision loss can be prevented or minimised if it is discovered early. The point is, seeing as most of the worlds blindness can be prevented or cured at low cost, maybe resources would be better spent striving for this rather than pursuing newsworthy but extremely limited solutions such as these implants. -"Oh, THAT power button"
Now they'll have to be more selective about who they date.
The device is kinda neat. It is 40 microns thick and consists of solar cells (miniature) connected to stimulating electrodes.
Perhaps it is cooler that someone is simply attempting to cure blindness in such a way. The sensory periphery for audition and vision is amenable to implants - in vision, for example, the retina holds about a million nerve cells arranged in a nice topographic array. In the cochlea there are a few tens of thousands of hair cells in a nice spiral array. A company spawned from the Otolaryngology labs at UCSF makes the only US designed cochlear implants (Advanced Bionics).
Of course, the optobionics device will be out of focus since the eye focusses light on the retina and not on the silicon chip. But hey - it'd be amazing if they could simply get enough current out of their device to stimulate a neuron. You'd need at least 10 microamps. The upside is that you do not need a power supply or wire lead into the retina - a tricky engineering feat for other retinal implant designs.
They didn't report if any of their patients implanted in late June had any vision yet. Guess what - they would be seeing by now if the implant worked. So my guess is that the device is a bust. And unfortunately, you don't really get that many clinical trials to fail in your device, no matter how well capitalized you are.
The other difficult thing about retinal implants is the number of stimulating sites required. You can hear speech with 8 stimulating electrodes and very good temporal fidelity. For vision - temporal fidelity is not so stringent, but you need at least 100 stimulating electrodes, each capable of pushing 10 microamps (AC, for a brief brief period). The problem is that you need to power the chip, and to do that you need a cable running into the eye. That probably necessitates the cutting or at least paralysis of the eye muscles, and a very tricky connection through the cornea. So you can see the allure of the optobionics device.
These guys are, however, great at marketing and fundraising. There will be a flurry of such press releases and fund raising bouts, for optobionics and other retinal stimulation companies. The presidents of the companies will get rich. I just hope one of them recruits a decent engineer so that someone gets to see again too. It doesn't seem like their approach is hopeless - but it certainly needs modification.
My friend suffers from RP(retinatis pigmentosa) and is actively watching this research work. He noted to me that these new chips will be useful for him, but not for people who lost their vision from other causes. For example, children who were born blind, can probably not be helped with an artificial retina. In addition, those that have never known sight may not be able to process the images in their brain. This work does look very promising for RP sufferers. When this technology becomes a reality for him, I figure I'll take him on down to the strip club, since it has been a while.
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
..but isn't the thing they're fixing here just one of many reasons for blindness?
I'm not a doctor, but it seems to me that there's more than one way for a person's eyes to not, or stop, work(ing), simply by excersising a bit of common sense. I mean, it's like saying that breast removal "cures cancer". Not quite.. it fixes one FORM of cancer (or, well, it can).
More power to these guys if it helps even a fraction of the blind folks out there.. but without more information than a press release, I remain skeptical that this is going to help everyone that has an eye problem. All the information available indicates it only repairs a rather narrow brand of blindness.
I'd just be wary of labelling these guys gods. Minor deity's, perhaps, because the achievment is pretty major.. but it seems to me it's only one step in the entire staircase.
At least the chronic ones, that is. Most heart disease can be prevented by proper diet and exercise. Most colon cancer can be prevented by proper diet. Most lung cancer can be prevented by not smoking (right, nicotineman? ;-).
Even many infectious diseases can be prevented with cheap stuff you can find around the home. Most STDs can be prevented by cheap latex barriers. Most malarial diseases can be prevented by proper screens and nettings. Most intestinal parasites can be prevented by proper sewage disposal.
The question you have to ask yourself, though, is can a buck be made by handing out this free and sensible advice? Most problems could be solved at lower cost by addressing these causes directly instead of treating their symptoms, but it's not as sexy and it runs contrary to human nature.
-- Anne Marie
AppleEye -- You get perfectly true color and are able to see the world in ways few people do. The problem with this, though, is that the current refresh rate is 3 times per second -- and it costs a QUITE significant amount of money to purchase an optical eye that has a better refresh rate.
However, the good news about the Apple version, is they'll be able to daisy chain other sensory functions off of the eyes. Experiments are being right now, to see if this is a viable solution to male impotence.
Why would you even want to say this is the case? I think a headline like "Further progress made restoring sight" would have been just as exciting and not at all a letdown when I read the actual article. Why claim miracles when simply describing current technology is amazing enough?
Actually, brains are remarkably flexible, but it's also equally interesting where they are not flexible.
A fascinating book on the subject is called Why Michael Couldn't Hit (and Other Tales from the Neurology of Sports). The author, a Neurologist, talks about the brain's role in becoming a world-class athlete. The title is in reference to asking the question of why Michael Jordan, possibly the best basketball player in history, utterly failed to be a competent baseball player.
It turns out that to be a world-class athlete, there are certain critical neurological growth periods where you have to play the sport or you will never be world-class in the sport. What's interesting is that the age seems to vary based on the sport. Most critical periods seem to be in adolescence, but he also talks about the fact that world-class violinists have to start at a very early age (like 5 or something) or it's simply too late.
You don't have to be into sports to enjoy the book. I found it extremely interesting because rarely do you see information about what the brain can't do.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I recall a story in one of the Oliver Sacks books about someone who had "motion blindness". There are parts of the brain that process motion, and the patient could see things that were still, but could see them in motion. It wasn't a tracking problem, it was a perception problem. The patient literally couldn't perceive objects in motion.
By the way, anyone who is interested in how the brain works and the nature of perception, concousness and reality should pick up some of his books. They are absolutely fascinating. Any of them will do. Sometimes the best way to see how the brain works is looking at the various ways it can malfunction.
One last story: he had a patient how could only percieve things on the right side of her, but not on the left. She was perfectly rational. Her vision was perfect. She simply couldn't percieve it. When she ate, she would have to eat from the right side of her plate, then turn the plate around. Then eat half of that. Then turn it around again, etc until there was nothing left.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
When prosthetic eyes are better than the standard eye, people will be ripping out their good eyes to get 'enhanced' eyes.
This would also lead to the manufacturer putting non-ignorable advertisements in your vision!
Imagine the type of virtual billboards you could have!
Oliver Sacks wrote about a man whose sight was restored but who was left nothing but confused. It wasn't the experience you'd expect. It wasn't even a net positive for him, as it destroyed his adaptive behavior and gave him nothing to replace it with.
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There's a crucial period in which the brain must be exposed to light and visual stimuli. As it gets exposed, neural pathways are trained to pave the way for visual attention and visual capability in general. The crucial period, IIRC, is the first several weeks to months after the child is born. Children who are unable to see during that period for whatever reason never seem to be able to, even if there is no damage to their optical "stuff" (to use the technical term).
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Unfortunately this posting describes retenitis pigmentosa, a relatively rare from of blindness. By far the most common is macular degeneration which occurs mostly in those 55 and older. The numbers of people affected by this disease are staggering; one in six in this age range experience the affects. The fact that this technology may be useful in cases of AMD is exciting news indeed - it has been estimated that as many as 10 million 'boomers' may go blind due to AMD.
I'm curious about something and I think the follow-up discussion will be interesting:
How do people that have been blind their entire life visualize things?
I don't mean to imply that they can't visualize, only that I'm wondering about the extent of their ability to create mental images and how they differ from my own (FYI, I am not blind). That is, it seems as thought they could feel an object and create some sort of wireframe-like thing in their head. Maybe a more appropriate question would have been directed at what they visualize. Most my visualization consist of a combination of things I've perceived with my eyes, not to mention issues associated with color.
Well, there's my potentially ignorant question that's probably only answerable by either blind people or someone who has close contact with them.
Educate us.
While true, it unfortunately is not good enough to map an entire sense from scratch after a certain age. Sight, and all the coordination that goes with it, is just way too complex to learn after a certain point. Think about it- when people talk about the brains amazing ability to remap new sense, we're usually talking about very simple things like motor switches- on/off- open closed. And even the brain's ability to adapt to serve these new functions is still limited- its never good as new. Sight, however, is immensely complex- it requires the coordination of millions of neurons and effects countless different parts of the brain. The person Oliver Sacks tested on wasn't even a good example- because he WENT blind early in his life- he at least had early experiences to start forming the pathways. And he couldn't make it.
And this story is different from what we heard in July how? Oh, except for 5 months passing an no substantive update as to how the people with these devices have turned out.
Could this help people with detached retinas?
;-)
Back in March, April, and May, I had sugery to reattach my retina after I got hit by that drunk driver. (I had surgery two or three times to do that!) What I'm wondering is, if it gets really bad, and they can't do anything for the retina, will one of these help? And would it help me ride a motorcylce again?
-- jason, who's so looking forward to riding again.
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
-- haaz.
I think this carries a larger message: large-scale change - even for the better - is terrifying to people and to those who wield authority or power under the old regime. Even though it seems farfetched, I would not be at all surprised to find out that the blind will be exhorted to remain so by some of their leaders and self-appointed advocates. All in the name of group identity.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine