Bionic Eye Patient Tests Planned For 2013

angry tapir writes "Australian researchers are getting ready to test a bionic eye on patients in 2013. The eye consists of 98 electrodes that stimulate nerve cells in the retina, which is a tissue lining the back of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses necessary for sight, and allow users to better differentiate between light and dark. With the bionic eye, images taken by a camera are processed in an external unit, such as a smartphone, then relayed to the implant's chip. This stimulates the retina by sending electric signals along the optic nerve into the brain where they are decoded as vision."

Comments

I can see where this is going...

[Tastecicles]

...right down the tubes if your bionic eye suddenly decides to start humming Bjork tunes and your Google phone joins in...

Re:I can see where this is going...

[Gadget_Guy]

Well from my limited knowledge of the bionic eye (gleaned from watching The Six Million Dollar Man), the sound of the eye would be extremely irritating. It makes a very loud Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo noise.

Saying it does not make you cool.

[SuricouRaven]

Please, don't quote the line. You know the one. The one with three comparatives. It's too predictable.

Re:Saying it does not make you cool.

[mblase]

Please, don't quote the line. You know the one. The one with three comparatives. It's too predictable.

We can requote it. We have the keyboards.

Re:Saying it does not make you cool.

[mcgrew]

You are correct; many baseball players with 20/20 get LAISIK to improve their vision to better than 20/20.

But this device isn't going to give anyone super vision. "The eye consists of 98 electrodes". That's some damned low resolution. This is for those with no vision at all, someone who has had their eye poked out completely. It will give a very tiny amount of vision to someone who was formerly completely blind. You wouldn't want to replace a working eyeball with this thing.

In twenty years? Who knows?

Re:Saying it does not make you cool.

[h5inz]

There is a 1500 electrode bionic eye already in use, or I am missinterpreting something.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120308-will-we-ever-restore-sight

Re:Saying it does not make you cool.

[Yvan256]

If one electrode equals one pixel of vision on a grid, 1600 electrodes would only mean a vision of 40x40 pixels.

Optical nerve isn't really a peripheral nerve

[DrYak]

One of the challenges I see is that the optical nerve, isn't really a peripheral nerve (connecting peripheral sensors to the central nervous system), but something connecting 2 parts of the central nervous system. Beside other peculiarities stemming from this, it has a result which makes the bionic eye much more complicated than other organ replacements:
The signal is already processed. Light get detected in the deeper layer of the retina (where the cones and rods lives), transmitted to the upper layer (nerves cells doing this transmission plays the same role as peripheral nerves) and gets processed in the upper layer.
The optical nerve doesn't carry simply levels detected from the cones and rods, instead it carry some shape information (boundary detection done by comparing signals from neighbouring groups of cones and rods) and colour contrast information (done by comparing the signal of a small group of cones with surrounding cones). (The same kind of pre-processing going into the spine or the crianial nerve's nuclei).

A bionic eye will need to similarly pre-process the image, and then manage to send the correct output to the correct type of fiber.
On the other hand, the various later stages of the visual pathway in the brain do further processing on the signal (line detection, shape detection, motion detection, etc...), so the brain might manage to make something useful out of the signal even if it isn't optimal at that stage.

I wonder how functional and useful the resulting perceived image would be for the patient. Well, probably better than nothing, but still...

Re:Optical nerve isn't really a peripheral nerve

[SuricouRaven]

They are interfacing to the retina. With appropriate interfacing, you might be able to keep all that processing capability intact. You'd just need a way to stimulate the photoreceptor cells and nothing else. Like, say, a sufficiently high resolution biocompatible OLED display.* Not much good against neural damage, but great if the fault is in the optical part of the eye. There's no reason it couldn't work, just engineering challenges to overcome.

* A literal retinal display. May be trademark issues.

Re:Optical nerve isn't really a peripheral nerve

[jellie]

From the lab's website, it appears that this wide-angle bionic eye has only 98 electrodes. I believe each electrode can only stimulate one photoreceptor, creating a "phosphene" (which is essentially a single point of light). With 98 electrodes, you can have a grid of up to 98 phosphenes to give a very primitive description of what you see. This research group also has a high-acuity implant with 1024 electrodes for better quality.

As to your original comment, I don't know but I imagine that stimulating any brain tissue is a complex thing itself. I've seen a short video about a woman using the Dobelle system, in which a pair of glasses with 144 electrodes is wired directly through the skull and the electrode is implanted in the visual cortex. I'm not sure what kind of signal processing is involved, but every patient had to be trained to interpret the images they saw (similar to this case). It looks much more difficult than the neuroprosthetic arms, since vision requires much less room for error.

Many groups have done similar things, but with different approaches. Here's a list of some of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis

Re:Optical nerve isn't really a peripheral nerve

[JustNiz]

I'm thinking that the project has a large expectation that the brain will also significantly adapt and learn to translate/process the incoming info.

The brain almost certainly wont be receiving info from the bionic eye thats even close to the same as a functioning eye would send given the same stimulus.

Not really an eye

[HJED]

If it is being processed on an external device it is likely that the camera will not be in the eye (at least at first), and it appears that any camera is supported which leads to some interesting possibilities (streaming TV or the internet direct to your optic nerve anyone?) and also some interesting hacking opportunities. To bad that installing something like this would require you to lose an eye however it could lead the way to space opera style cyborgs.

I assume that 98 electrodes means a resolution similar to 98 pixels so it sadly wouldn't provide a very good replacement, however this will probably improve in time as historically eye problems have attracted strong support and funding. It would also not work very well for people with damaged optic nerves and would probably require the removal of a natural eye if the patient has one.

Re:Huh?

[wonkey_monkey]

Replacing "by" with a comma in the last sentence clarifies things:

This stimulates the retina, sending electric signals along the optic nerve into the brain where they are decoded as vision.

*Challenge*, not *impossible*

[DrYak]

You're absolutely right. Your bullshit superficial analysis based on very few facts definitely shows that first bionic eye won't be very useful.

Sorry, but where again did I say that no bionic eye will ever be possible?
I said there's an interesting challenge. And probably the first generations of bionic eye will have a hard time replacing the whole retina including this processing functionality. In fact, apparently due to this exact challenge, the first planned bionic eye don't replace the whole retina, but stimulate the middle layer (the one transmitting the signal from receptors to the upper processing layers), thus not replacing the whole retina, but only the photoreceptor (still useful for some disease, like macular degeneration as reported elsewhere in this thread, but not yet as useful for other disease like diabetes where the whole retina dies)

where uninformed opinion is rated Informative

It happens, not only that IAAMD, but that I did my bachelor-level thesis (well equivalent thereof. It was before the Bologna treaty in europe and the splitting of university cursus into bachelor and master) on bionic implants. Got to interview scientist working on such implants (research teams working bionic eyes, and surgical team using cochlear implant). This challenge is exactly what said bionic eye researcher told us too. And given the above, this is also considered for the upcoming bionic eyes.

But yeah, its just easy to troll around and bash people making point about interesting challenges arising in some research.