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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."
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.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Especially when installed in pairs.
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.
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
I guess it sounds more exciting to call them "solar cells," but obviously they're light sensors. If they were originally developed for use in solar electricity production, that should be in article, not the headline. "Matters for Nerds. Stuff that News!"
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.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
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?
You can't handle the truth.
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!
My wife has early onset RP and it does far more than affect night vision and peripheral vision - it ultimately causes all vision to be lost, from the outside in. In the past few months my wifes central vision in her right eye has started to fail dramatically.
Normally RP is diagnosed later on in life so the full effects of the disease are not normally experienced, however many suffer from childhood and it is those people that will benefit from this type of technology.
In tandem with this research there has also been progress made in retinal transplants using stem cell growth mediums to allow the cells to function normally.
Its nice to see some hope, particularly for my wife who has been told that she would be blind by the time she was ten. That was 23 years ago.
This is great news. I've been following these procedures for quite some time. Retinitis Pigmentosa runs in our family.
One thing to point out is that this disease is a degeneration of the retina. It's called pigmentosa due to the fact that as the retinal cells die, small spots appear on the retina. The degenerations starts on the outside, and moves inward, creating a tunnel-like feeling for the patient.
My uncle had surgery in Cuba (We live in Guatemala, so let's just skip the whole Cuba-American posts) where they operated his retina, and treated it with oxygen and Ozone therapies. This type of operation is not intended to cure it, but to stop it. This was about 5 years ago, and his retinitis pigmentosa has not spread, but it's still a bit early to know for sure.
If you have more questions there is tons of information on the web
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Arturo Mijangos
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.
That russian girl was flown to the US for further testing - this was on nat-geo or discovery not long ago. This is all from memory so I may be wrong...
She had to specify the problems of 7 or 9 patients (can't remember exactly) - she did score quite high, but not high enough for it to be any more believable than educated guess work. Threw a bit of a tantrum when she found out she would not be able to view the bodies of the patients before making her decision.
She took far longer to make a diagnosis under test conditions than the the scratchy home video's from Russia.
She had been hanging around hospitals back home, so this is not at all suprising. All the evidence points toward her 'not' having any magical powers.
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.
Is solar powered brain for idiot people
Care to volunteer?
--Residential Interior Design
IAAVN (I Am A Visual Neuroscientist) working on artificial vision. I have seen presentations on this approach, and unlike many of the other efforts in this field, Dr. Chow's claims appear astonishingly good.
The basic idea is beautiful and elegant: you put an array of tiny photodiodes behind the retina, exactly where the photoreceptor cells (rods and cones) are. Shining light on each of these nearly-cell-sized photodiodes creates a localized voltage which should stimulate a small handful of cells, generating a signal that will mimic the original biologically transduced input to the retina. The photodiodes nicely supplant the dying photosensitive cells. It sounds perfect.
I was very impressed with their presentation at a one-day symposium on artificial vision I attended at USC a few years ago, until one of the audience members pointed out that they had done some calculations, and it seemed that one would need incredibly high light levels to generate enough current to stimulate the local cells. Dr. Chow admitted that, even being optimistic about the conversion efficiency of photodiodes (which here need to be optimized for biocompatibility more than efficiency), the physics involved dictates that you would need light bright enough to cause damage to even the non-photosensitive tissue to get the device to work. Dr. Chow then backpedaled to say that even if the device cannot restore lost vision, it can perhaps supplant any remaining healty cells to improve vision in low-sighted patients. That question-anwer cycle was the first point in his presentation where he backed off from the claim of restoring full vision to blind patients.
Dr. Chow's results were done in a private laboratory, part of a company set up to profit from his advances. He must answer to his shareholders, and his results are not open to the level of scruitiny that standard scientific claims are. He was reluctant to answer questions at this session. Therefore, as a scientist I am bound by the lack of openness to view his claims with a grain of salt.
Other efforts to create artificial vision are still having trouble with just a handful of points of light. While I believe that the subretinal approach has a good chance of eventually proving fruitful, using a silicon-based device that lacks an external power source just cannot produce normal vision. This is why the article concentrates on the improvements in existing low vision, rather than discussing restoration of lost vision.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.