Patients get Solar Implants in Eyes

Ben Sullivan writes "As reported at Science Blog, ophthalmologists have implanted Artificial Silicon Retina microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa. The implant is a 2mm chip that contains about 5,000 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. Already some patients have experienced improvements such as not bumping into objects around the house, and being able to read the time on a clock."

Comments

Quality

[sanosuke001]

How do the doctors know what kinds of electrical signals the brain needs in order to see what they;re supposed to see?

Also, if they do figure out how to make this like our vision, don't solar cells "see" in higher wavelengths than our eyes do? Wouldn't people not see blue and purple but instead get UV and the like?

Re:Quality

[roman_mir]

They don't have to know anything like that. All they need to do is to provide voltage that is within parameters of the cell resistance (just enough but not to burn the cells.) The brain takes care of mapping electrical signals to the visual part of cortex. I suppose this will only produce shadows of gray and not color. To produce color they will have to do more than a single electrical signal, but for shadows of one color (gray?) voltage difference will be enough.

I wonder what is the life of the solar cells? Will they have to be replaced time to time?

Re:Quality

[humina]

In order to stimulate the millions of rods and cones individually in order to produce color, the implants would need to be significantly smaller. Currently these implants stimulate large groups of rods and cones. It is currently impossible to individually select the rods and cones for stimulus with this approach. Stanford has a research project to use chemical stimulus to stimulate individual rods and cones.

The problem with using solar cells is in order to make enough power, you want the solar cell to be bigger in order to absorb the most light. You also want the solar cells to be small in order to increase the resolution. The research here is increasing efficiency like crazy.

The problem with Stanford's research is releasing and recapturing the chemicals needed for stimulus. And the chemical approach is behind the electrical approach. The electrical approach already has had success with patients.

Orson Scott Card

[1010011010]

Sounds like we're on the road to the artificial eye one of OSC's characters had in the Ender's Game series. One of its cool features was that you could pull pictures and video off of it, as well as see through it. It was an in-skull camera.

Improvements

[Harald74]

Night vision, anyone?

Re:Improvements

[Haydn Fenton]

Well maybe not "we" as a whole, but "we" as in one of the human race, already can.. There is a Russian girl whom posses some kind of x-ray type vision. She claims she can swap between normal vision, or the x-ray type vision at will.
Yes, you don't have to believe it if you don't want, for all those sceptics, I'll agree it seems a pretty outrageous claim, but despite efforts of scientists, they have been unable to disprove her claims. She has successfully seen into people's bodies and correct one claim that a pateint had cancer, when in fact it was just a cyst. She's going to study medical.

Anyway, back to the article.. this seems like a very very very useful piece of technology, surely it could be ported to other things than eyes, eventually enabling a vast amount of disfunctions to be rectified. And I don't see why it couldn't be modified, as the parent says, to be able to have nightvision, infra-red vision, etc.

Re:Improvements

[AllUsernamesAreGone]

It was 7 patients and she correctly diagnosed 4 of them. Each patient had a different condition and they were things like removed appendix, lower aesophagus or lung section, metal staples left in the chest after surgery, an artificial hip and a metal plate in the skull while the 7th had nothing wrong.

It was also hardly a fair test - she had been seperated from her mother and interpreter, the CSICOP AND CSMMH testers had set the minimum match threshold higher than the standard probability of 1 in 20 in pscyhology tests and there were no independent observers. They also conceled the fact that she achieved higher than 50 to 1 odds to reach the correct matches by shouting about he missing the 5 matches they required he to get to pass their test.

Re:Improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

She not only failed to get a better than chance success ratio - she failed to find a *metal plate* in the skull of one of the subjects.

Fraud or wishful thinking, nothing more.

THere is some covnerage of this on http://www.skepdic.com/

Stevie Wonder...

[cswiii]

Isn't this what Stevie Wonder has, w/r/t the pigmentosa? Furthermore, I seem to remember them talking about the possibility a couple of years ago that he would be a candidate for something similar, with a microchip.

I'd imagine that his condition has degenerated far too much along to be aided by this, but if I recall correctly, they nonetheless said he might be a candidate for something similar. I don't think they ended up using him, however.

in time..

[hielenlikker]

i wonder what will be first: - a human of whom all parts are subsituted by technology - a robot which will have a real human soul

Bionics

[ArsonSmith]

When will we get the ability to enhance current senses and strength. This kind of tech is always the most fun.

Incrediably important

[UlfGabe]

This development is very very^H^H^H^H^H important. I have been reading the material on this stuff and it looks as if it is possible to give people devoid of sight, some sight back.

THE REAL treasure here is knowing the brain can adapt. Think about it, they were deprived of sight, and then their brain was able to REORGANIZE itself to understand totally FOREIGN signals and use them as input.

It demonstrates how our wetware is more adaptable than any hardware.

I'm excited!

[plalonde2]

As someone who has been losing central vision from a pesky bleeding blood vessel under my retina, this news really excites me.

On friday I'm going in for essentially the same surgery, only instead of inserting a chip, they try to deal with the bad blood vessel. Then, after a week of lying face down, and a month of no flying (which kills my easy work commute and turns it into a 5 hour ordeal), I get to find out how much damage was done to my retinal pigments by the blood that has been pooling there for half a year.

Damage that *used* to be un-repairable. With this technology now deployed there's a good chance it will be routine for people like me in 10-15 years.

And given that the likelyhood of diagnosis in the second (currently good) eye is about 1 in 50 per year from now on, the stats give me 15-25 years before I start worrying about getting an artificial retina.

Hooray for bionics!

Re:excellent

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Any word yet on those muscular implants?

I guess so...

It's advancements like these...

[RootsLINUX]

...that make me wish I studied life science instead of computer engineering. I'd love to say I contributed to a great advancement like this, and the biomedical field really interests me. In computer architecture if I were to say "I invented a new branch predictor that's 100% accurate and only consumes 20% of the normal die area", about 19/20 people wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about. Are we forever to be unsung heroes? >_>

The brain learns

[Anonymous Coward]

When surgeons re-attach a severed limb they don't worry about getting all the neurons connected correctly. They connect them randomly, and the brain learns the new mapping.

Physically therapy takes care of the learning, but it is a side effect, the brain is good at learning new mappings. The body generally has many more problems making everything work, in ways that are not related to incorrectly attached neurons.

Re:The brain learns

[FirienFirien]

In case anyone isn't sure whether the eyes are too complex for the brain to learn, remember that they did experiments with putting inverting glasses on people, so they saw everything upside down.

I think it took about half a week for people's brains to respond 'correctly' to a given situation (e.g. not bumping into things).

When the goggles were removed, the test subjects saw things upside down. The brain had adjusted sufficiently to seeing upside down that reverting to the standard way up confused it.

There was a comment from one of the users that he did occasionally still get confused, which implies that the wiring in these photodetectors may occasionally confuse the user slightly as the brain tries to remember which signal protocol it's using, but the main point is the speed of learning seen in the experiment.

MPAA owns your eyes

[tepples]

One of [the] cool features [of a science-fictional eye implant that this product resembles] was that you could pull pictures and video off of it, as well as see through it. It was an in-skull camera.

Watch people with implants be banned from entering movie theaters.