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Bionic Eye Gives Blind Man Sight
AmigaMMC writes "A man who lost his sight 30 years ago says he can now see flashes of light after being fitted with a bionic eye. Ron, 73, had the experimental surgery seven months ago at London's Moorfield's eye hospital. He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even sort socks using the bionic eye, known as Argus II. I wouldn't go as far as claiming he regained his sight, but this certainly is a biotechnological breakthrough."
RTFA. It's a clinical trial, it has two years yet to run.
After that, I expect that the designers will do BionicEyeMk2, and there'll be another clinical trial. Maybe in a decade, this will become generally available.
Well, generally available to people with Retinitis Pigmentosa, anyway. It's intended to help people with that condition, not just any old blind guy. What other forms of blindness it might be useful for remains to be seen.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
From this press release this appears to have only 60 electrodes (and I assume only grayscale). This is definitely remarkable progress, but still nowhere close to achieving a bionic eye that can come even close to rivaling the real human eye.
The question they're also answering (besides how well does this work) is how well can the brain interpret simple images into more complex images that would allow someone to get by in life. That may be as interesting, if not more interesting, than the actual experiment with the device.
You need a patient that has gone completely blind from Retinitis pigmentosa or Ag related macular degeneration in order to put the implant in. You will still have better vision in the early stages of the disease. Depending on how bad you get the disease it could take a decade or so before you completely lose your vision. most of the test subjects are quite old for this technology.
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OK. this is the Argus II. Which means the MEA (microelectrode array) has only 60 electrodes. Call it 64 to make it easy. Take a picture from a camera. convert it to greyscale. Shrink it down to 8x8. Then expand it to fill your entire field of vision. (use a good enough editor- one that will do smoothing between pixels as you scale it up).
That should give you a rough idea of how much data is actually available, and also why they don't want to show a picture- people wouldn't be impressed. But to me, this is exciting.
I actually did RTFA, and I thought it would be beneficial to do this clinic on a younger person for two reasons, both humanitarian, and scientific. How would doing a clinical trial on someone who would benefit more be detracting on the study? Sorry for ruining your image of /. not RTFAs.
These implants are only useful to people with retinitis pigmentosa and age related macular degeneration. You rarely/never see full blindness from these diseases in the young. I think a young patient that has gone completely blind from those diseases would be 50.
In both of those diseases the rods and cones in your eye degenerate but the nerve cells that are routing information through the optic nerve are still in tact. These are the cells that are stimulated. In other forms of blindness (such as damage to the optical cortex or a severed optical nerve) these implants will not work.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
Seriously... from being *blind* (no vision at all, whatsoever, etc.) to not just having say a single signal (dark/light), or 3 signals (enough to determine some direction), but 60??
That's enough not just to make out direction, but also movement.
The only problem I see is that it's not quite like a photo in that it isn't a regular grid.
The last I read about this, it went a little something liek this...
They stick all N electrodes into the visual cortex and then activate them, one by one, and ask the user "is this point more left or more right than this one? Is it higher or lower?" The reason for this is...
1. they don't know exactly -what- the user is in fact seeing.. they don't even know what 'direction' an electrode is actually giving a signal.
2. the implantee was blind before. Giving them a single signal and asking them to point roughly into the direction of the illuminated blob they can 'see' is futile - they have no reference.
Once done, they have a map of where the electrodes roughly are in relationship to eachother, as well as a map of which electrodes are weak, which don't work at all, etc. Only -then- can they hook it up to an imaging processor's output, and weeks of training the user begins. I.e. put a lightbulb right in front of them - what they might 'see' is an illuminated blob nearer to the lower-right of their 'vision', seen from our viewpoint. On the up side, if they have always been blind, they can easily be told that the illumination is coming from directly in front of them. If the implantee had lost his sight later in life, however, they're going to have to re-learn their visual processing.
Regardless of all of these 'issues', it remains VERY impressive indeed that we can make some deaf people hear and some blind people see.. even if it's nowhere near the acuity of most people, -any- hearing/vision is an immeasurable improvement over -no- hearing/vision.
Alan Alda did a show several years ago on Scientific American Frontiers called "Cybersenses" where he featured a guy who also had an "artificial eye" implanted. It used 64 electrodes (if I remember correctly) and they were working on one that used 1024.
He was able to actually get enough information out of his that he could read letters printed on the wall of the building they were in. He also saw a "bright spot" when they went outside that turned out to be Alan's forehead.
Bill
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Instead of an "Holy Crap! The Blind Can See!" as a summary, is it too much to ask that you add half a sentence describing the specific condition that this procedure is capable of treating? "A man who lost his sight 30 years ago from retinitis pigmentosa, a group of genetic diseases causing retina degeneration, ..." would have been fine.
Sure, I can click over and read the original source, but it's not so convenient sifting through paragraphs on the BBC's website when I'm reading this on my Pocket PC while sitting on the can.
The advancement isn't in the attachment to the eye, but rather the machinerie of the device. The one that you're thinking of would have had a resolution of 4x4, meaning 16 pixels which where either black or white. If I understand corectly, this device has 60 pixels (about 7x7, it can't be square though) and produces some sort of grey scale (ether 16 or 256 both of wich beat 2). The thing is that they both interface into the optic nerve in the same way.
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Slashdot covered the story at the time, but I don't have the URL handy.
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But was that blind as in can't see anything or just legally blind?
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