Bionic Retinas Give Patients Sight

The Noof writes " Yahoo News is running a story about patients who have been given partial sight thanks to implants of silicon-based bionic retinas. " The article notes that the implant is having a "rescue effect" on the other components of the retina, restoring cells around the implant and making them useful again." Amazing stuff.

Comments

Re:question

[istartedi]

Let's build on that. How dense could the sensors get before the optical limits of the eye would become the bottleneck?

Also, since these things are using the photo-voltaic effect to generate the electrical impulse, isn't there a limit to how well they would work in low light? Can that limit be overcome? Could they build units that grabbed inductive power from a transmitter in your glasses to overcome that problem, or maybe even allow super night vision? Will future soldiers be encouraged to get such implants? On the opposite side of that equation, would they allow you to look at the sun without being damaged?

Re:question

[Aix]

I think you underestimate just how good human biological vision really is. It is easy to think at first that rods and cones are just like CCDs or pixels or whatever. It is far more complicated than that. In fact, there is extensive research that demonstrates that you can see in higher resolution than should be optically possible. The reason this works is complicated, but basically comes down to the fact that there is an immense amount of inter-cellular interpolation going on. It can be modeled simplistically as an array of voltage sources.

A good starter paper might be the classic "What the Frog's Eye Tells The Frog's Brain" by McCullough, Pitts and Lettvin. (From MIT's RLE Lab in the 50's) More recently, Marr's stuff is supposed to be very good.

Re:Limited Potential

[mr_exit]

WOW this is the greatest news I have heard all year.... it has totally made my day.

Ok calm down... explanation time..

I have had retina reatachment surgery 3 times in two years. this is where they take your eyes out, cut open the 6 rows of stiches in each eye and stick the retina back on. They dont know what is causing it (not bungee jumping or a car accident) and everytime it happens my retina gets a little more cut up and i have all sorts of weird stripes through my vision.

Now you my say.. "tough luck, you have bad eyes, live with it" but you see my whole life is based arround my eyes. I am a visual effects artist for the movies (lately 3d modeling on a movie about a ring) my eyes are my livilyhood.

And so the chance that they are one step closer to being able to replace them matters more to me then anything i have heard all year.

So if this is the "limited potential" you are talking about mr katz then i'm not really sorry for getting excited for nothing