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Implants Allow the Blind to See
gihan_ripper writes "Neurosurgeon Kenneth Smith has performed a revolutionary operation on St Louis resident Cheri Robertson, connecting a camera directly to her optic nerve. The rig is in principle similar to Geordi La Forge's visor, albeit in very rudimentary form. At present, the 'image' consists of a number of white dots, as on an LED display. There are also governmental restrictions on this research, forcing Kenneth and his team to fly to Portugal to carry out the operation. If this technology takes off, the future will be bright for the sight-impaired."
To look at the world "like one big xray slide" you'd have to carry around a source of xrays and put them behind the subject, then use your xray sensitive eyes (good luck developing those) to detect the rays coming through the subject. It's not exactly like there are a buncha xrays flying through us all the time, ya know.
While it seems to be a rare operation, the parent was right: this has been done before.
Another strategy was just invented: if you lost your photoreceptors, just make the other neurons in the retina or brain sensitive to light. A group just managed this today, for the first time, in mice. Blind mice, who had been treated with viruses that cause the targeted cells to express light-activated channels, were able to regain transmission of information about the external world to cortex. This was recently reported in a blog, and in other media.
Pretty cool nonetheless.
I didn't quite understand from the article why this procedure was prevented in the US, aside from cost.
This is more or less the same technique that's been researched for decades - I saw a film (as opposed to videotape) of it in junior high when I was a kid.
There are a number of problems - as others have mentioned, it tends to cause seizures in its users. IIRC this is because the apparatus itself is fairly crude and overloads the part of the brain it's connected to. It also doesn't work very well - the resolution now is not a whole lot better than back then.
Obviously an argument can be made that someone who loses their sight may consider any visual ability valuable enough to outweigh the risks, but in this case I think the FDA is right. This particular technology is not mature enough to allow as a commercial product. There are others in development that IMO are more promising.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It's important to note that due to the way the human brain develops synaptic connections in the visual cortex, only humans who had sight from birth to some age beyond 3 to 5 years of age will benefit a great deal from such a procedure. While people who are blind from birth due to cataracts or other conditions obtain some visual perception when the cataract is later removed, most never develop the neural connections that allow them to identify what they're seeing. Everything from navigating around desks in a well-lit classroom to differentiating a face from a table, a television, a light bulb, or an automobile is all but impossible if the visual cortex doesn't develop properly in response to normal visual stimulus from birth. Sight is useless without the ability to percieve what one is really seeing. So while this is incredibly impressive and promising for people who had sight but lost it, don't expect that this will be a cure-all to allow people with all types of blindness to see again.
The optical nerve goes to the back of the brain.
Oh well, what the hell...
Uh, no. "Image sensors", like eyes, don't produce a signal that is fundamentally different from the signals produced by any other sensory organ. What matters is where in the location in the brain to which those signals are directed. Although I'm not certain, I'd guess that this is why the technique won't work on those who were never able to see - they never developed the necessary neural connections in the brain for vision.