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."

Comments

Then again

[AnonGCB]

He only got the starter package -- Due to the economy he couldn't afford his first choice with the laser.

Re:Then again

[gamanimatron]

...and his robe and wizard hat...

73 years old?

[amclay]

I would have imagined they would want a subject that would live for longer (average) so that they could continue to have studies about long-term use and wear on the eye socket. That being said, I'm glad progress is being made, and look forward to my own cybor...er replacement eye.

Re:73 years old?

[Abstrackt]

Maybe they wanted an older (closer to dead) person to test on because the process wasn't guaranteed to be safe.

Re:73 years old?

[sjames]

Since it's an invasive procedure and quite experimental, they may also be considering that getting the 0.8alpha version could preclude getting the more perfected version later. So there's an advantage to a subject that would be too old to undergo an implant by the time the production version is ready. He gets some vision (which beats none) and nobody loses their chance for an even better outcome as a result of the experiment.

Re:73 years old?

[humina]

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.

Re:73 years old?

[humina]

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.

Re:73 years old?

[karnal]

What other forms of blindness it might be useful for remains to be seen.

Tell me you meant that in the form of a pun... please!

I'm not buying it

[Anonymous Coward]

so a man gets his sight back after being blind for 30 years, and the very first thing he does ISN'T download porn? This is some kind of hoax.

Re:I'm not buying it

[Spasemunki]

Maybe he learned something from going blind the first time...

Re:I'm not buying it

[GoombaTroopa]

This reminds me of a stupid idea I thought of once: A Braille monitor!

I could imagine it now, a blind person moving their fingers across the screen, saying "There are two girls and a cup AARRGH AARRGH AARRGH AARRGH!!!"

Re:I'm not buying it

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

http://www.pornfortheblind.org/

When i see things like this...

[glitch23]

I wish the scientists would provide a picture that represents what the person can see so we can see for ourselves just how much of a breakthrough it is. Obviously if the guy can perform daily tasks it is great and I'm happy for the guy but I'd like to see the qualify of the images he is seeing for my own curiousity.

Re:When i see things like this...

[jd]

There are photos on the web of images grabbed from the optic nerve of a cat. They're old, but the description given (can barely see the full moon on a cloudless night) seems to compare well with those early experiments in image capture, and image capture is much easier than image injection (which is what these guys are doing).

Re:When i see things like this...

[bencoder]

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.

Re:When i see things like this...

[gad_zuki!]

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.

So if you see this then he see this.

Perhaps its a blessing afterall.

Re:When i see things like this...

[jd]

• The BBC story
• Neuroscience story

Slashdot covered the story at the time, but I don't have the URL handy.

Is this Slashdot or Star Trek?

[gravos]

His physical and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is Futile.

Too bad he's in London

[Guido del Confuso]

He says he can now follow white lines on the road

Here in California, that'd be good enough to issue him a driver license.

Re:Too bad he's in London

[geekoid]

Follow, not snort.

Re:I wouldn't go as far as claiming he can see now

[fractoid]

Congratulations, he's a human cockroach. :P

Re:The Eyeball Singularity

[incognito84]

I just want to have the ability to rotate my eyeball 180 degrees and look at my own brain.

It is VERY impressive

[Animaether]

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.

Re:It is VERY impressive

[TinBromide]

I read an article about how they strapped special glasses onto owls that flipped the world upside down. They found that it took the owls a few days to kill prey perfectly, but they got to within 99% of their prior abilities with the glasses on in a relatively short time (like a few days).

When they took the glasses off the owls took a few hours to re-orient themselves to the original right side up orientation.

Its been like a decade since I read the article or saw the documentary, but I remember commentary about how if they applied it to humans, there would be a similar learning curve.

Who knows, if given enough time, they might not have needed to re-orient the points for the signal processing.

I also remember reading that the only thing that babies can make out visually are bright spots and faces, but that was in a facial recognition article about how the brain has a hardwired portion that flashes bright when a face appears in its vision. (Its why we like looking through photos with people in them).