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Need A New Retina? Look No Further
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?"
I'd love to keep one eye, probably my 'good' eye, after testing to see which is the best, and modify the other to give retinal overlay data. You could look at an object and it would draw an overlay and data on it. Also, the ability to turn this overlay on or off! How about zoom, or freeze frame capabilites all without having your eyes look any different than they would naturally. :)
I know it's a long way off, but that kind of visual enhancement would be awesome. And expensive. And I want it.
It's a Bagel.
But I simply cannot imagine having any of this kind of enhancement: ever. I might consider it if say it was to restore something I'd lost completely (like my sight) but as an enhancement? No I don't think so. But then perhaps I'm a luddite: I haven't seriously considered laser eye surgery, partly because it's risky (however small) but mostly because my current eyeballs + glasses work just fine.
And as a humorous aside: how long do you think it would be before scumware companies worked out how to spam you new implants? "I ploughed into that part of school children because I was distracted by the advert for cheap viagra my retinaly implants I had just received".
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The problem with having a camera for an eye is that if they got good, they most certainly would cause enromous legal issues. You could conceivably record your own sight, which would run afoul of various copyright, privacy, and wire-tap laws in the US and abroad. More so if you broadcast them, or if security/access control was in place.
Aren't people using retinas for developing biometric identification? I wonder what the consequences of this would be ...DoS a system with a bunch of people with the same retinal scans?
I know with the iris they can measure the amount it constantly expands and contracts by to verify it's not a contact lens or similar. I presume though when they reach the stage of replacing the whole eye they'd be able to even fake that.
This is very good news! My brother had been hurt in an accident has a child and has limited vision in one eye. The retina of his eye was damaged and several thousand dollars and hundreds of trips to clinics and hospitals later, we have been where we started!
This is early days yet, I know, but it offers some hope.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
This is great news for me, I recently had an eye scan which showed the first signs of retinal damage after years of being diabetic... They reckon I have about ten years lefy so these guys need to get it up to at least JPEG resolution by then so I can still jack into my laptop and get my pr0n.. ;)
but then why not take that to the next level, if this technology gets far enough along, lets say by 2020, then if a child is born blind and we have good ways of testing it, we could immediately implant the eyes and train the visual cortex from as early as possible so the child gains at least some sight(of course, I`m assuming you can`t do this surgery on a new born but probably can before the age of 6).
Anyways, if they can do heart surgery on newborns, I think they could quickly learn to pull this off and it would be an even greater gift by helping to eliminate many forms of blindness.
I'm not saying it could be retrained to process visual information after a lifetime of other use, I just thought its cool how the brain can effectively rewire itself. Kinda like detaching the speakers from your computer and having the sound card automatically start processing graphics (or something)
Apparently it's possible to replace a damaged cornea with one of your own teeth - I remember seeing a TV show about a guy who did it - I can't find that story but here's another example.
There's actually an article (subscription) on this in this week's edition of Nature. It's about a guy who was blind from birth but - at the age of 52 - received a corneal graft that enabled him to see for the first time.
The psychologists were dumbfounded to discover that he could read the time on clocks and even the titles of books straight away, without any learning. It turned out that he had a "blind" watch (a clock without a cover over the face, so he could tell the time from feeling the positions of the fingers), and at school he'd been taught to recognise capital letters by their shape. Somehow this shape information was transferred from touch into sight ("cross-modal transfer").
However, when it came to objects that were out of his tactile knowledge, he was unable to respond to them properly - e.g. he had no way of estimating the distance of any object further away than the length of his arm, and pictures and photographs were just meaningless blobs of colour.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
This Eurekalert article discusses a new technique using chemical messengers to lead nerve growth toward a specific site. While originally intended for spinal regrowth after severe trauma, it (and the many other research projects online the same line) would appear relevant to this artificial vision project. They're trying to save the optical nerve so they can stimulate from the eye to the brain. If they could regrow nerve tissue care in surgical placement of the implant during eye surgery might be of less concern.
Also, PBS has a series Innovation - Life, inspired where one of the episodes discusses another artificial vision procedure consisting of a direct ocular brain implant currently in human trials. The program follows a patient who has the surgical procedure done and then her recuperation and initial testing of the implant. Most interesting. They also show another group who is trying a different kind of brain implant, but who haven't yet made it to human trials.
Between nerve / brain cell regrowth and implant research ongoing we will likely see amazing cures for formerly untreatable injuries and illnesses within our lifetimes. It's pretty amazing to see the beginnings of Bionic Man type stuff actually happen in my lifetime. --M
I heard about people blind from birth gaining their sight. They went crazy because sight was to much for them to handle. Anyone else hear of this?
You are correct. This is why my deaf-blind wife, after reading for too long complains about 'tired eyes'. It's not the eyes that are tired, it's the visual cortex.
Of course, she skews things a bit, as she was born with both vision and hearing.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon