[sigh].... do not feed the troll.... do not feed the troll...
OK, I'll feed the troll. Yes, I am acutely aware of Paul Bach-y-Rita's work. You however apparently do not understand the concepts that you are invoking. There is plasticity in neural systems, yes. Plasticity is important in vision, sure. Nobody, *anywhere* has demonstrated that they can generate coherent "visual percepts" in a coordinated fashion with any kind of stimulus. Its far more complicated than hooking up electrodes and stimulating until someone "learns" what the stimulus means.
btw, the tongue thing is very, very cool. Its not vision and does not even map to vision, but those lingual electrodes can easily map topographic data, sonar data, relief data, contrast data onto the high resolution innervation of the tongue and allow people to interpret those stimulii as a map to be followed. The technology was originally developed for US Navy SEALS to navigate complex 3D environments at night, with no light and it works. It works incredibly well with very little training necessary. I would like to see more effort and funds put into techniques like that to help people live more independent lives.
I am familiar with Nirenberg's work. What Nirenberg seems to be missing is that the programming outflow of the retina is altered in retinal disease. ON and OFF channels are substantially altered in retinal disease and the whole programming substrate is altered because the circuitry and programming down to the molecular levels is altered.
Its not all pessimism though as we will need to understand how the normal retina signals and I find her work to be interesting and compelling. Though she is not addressing *which channels* of information outflow are being encoded. There are 14-16 separate outflow channels in the retina that project to different areas of cortex and sub cortex and she is not addressing how to separate those channels and what those separate channels mean in terms of the "visual world".
This is just my point. While I understand that science and engineering has to start somewhere, they have made promises to this woman and done surgery to her, potentially increasing risks for other problems where I would argue there is no hope of "seeing" anything coherent.
Yes, we can do remarkable things with even an 8x8 pixel array, but this approach has no promise of even delivering that to this woman. The electrode cuff on the optic nerve simply stimulates too many neurons that are not coherent and those neurons project to far too many areas of cortex. A retinal implant that appropriately targets cell populations would be more appropriate as would genetic engineering of targeted opsins to other cell classes.
As for implants directly in the cortex, I might argue that this has a better chance of stimulating phosphenes that could be interpreted as vision. I've participated in some of that early work http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/08/bionic-implants/ and while I believe there are other approaches that will be more effective, that work still has some promise (particularly for motor interfaces).
We'll see... I would have liked to have seen some traditional methods of evaluation in animal models using psychophysics before moving directly to humans. Were I a betting man, I don't think the engineering is up to the biological task right now. A couple decades work already suggests that we don't yet understand how the information is coded to get into the brain.
Yeah, its easy for people to get enthused about rescuing vision loss. Its an important thing and keeps us working at all hours of the day as hard as we can to understand how the visual system works and how to fix it when it goes wrong. We've published before on this issue and I am sure they are aware of the work. My only concern is when promises are made to patients and expectations are built up that these devices will cure blindness when the biology has not been worked out and the engineering is predicated upon that imprecise understanding of the biology.
For the first part, see my comment to femto above.
As for the neurons changing their behavior, yes... that is exactly what I am saying. It definitely happens in the retina as the retina is reprogrammed and there is some evidence that it happens higher up as well. Though those precise studies have yet to be performed.
So, flashes of light are simply uncoordinated signaling by neurons. Turns out vision is far more complicated than the cochlear system that allows us to engineer bionic solutions for hearing. Provided the cochlea is intact, it is easy to stimulate those neurons in an appropriate manner that people can learn to interpret. Vision is another story entirely and unless you stimulate the *right* neurons with the *right* type of stimulation, its not gonna work.
So, which ganglion cell populations are they going to stimulate? The optic nerve contains from 14-16 classes of ganglion cells that project to different areas of brain. Its a tough tough problem because those ganglion cells and the axons in the nerves project not only to LGN, but also to a large number of subcortical areas like the SCN and tectum. Then what about the remnant signals that may be coming from peripheral regions of the retina (in cases of AMD) and central retina (in cases of RP)?
Again, they are moving forward with engineering without necessarily understanding the biology.
What they are claiming is that the bionic implant will work in a degenerate retina. The substrate circuitry has changed. No chance of it transducing vision... They are either going to have to intervene at an earlier time point (much earlier than most folks realize) or bypass the retina or reconstruct the retina. There is more biology at play here than a simple engineering project.
Note: This is *NOT* vision. This is an uncoordinated stimulation of neurons that is no more vision than poking your eye and seeing flashes of light or knocking yourself on the back of the head and seeing stars. Vision is a far more complicated matter and these investigators that are promoting this bionic chip have ignored or are ignorant of over a decade of research that shows the neurons in the eye change their wiring in response to retinal degenerative disease. When the wiring in the retina changes, it is no longer able to mediate normal retinal signaling...
Dude... I've been washing my keyboards for years. Spill coffee in them? Run EM under the tap and dry them out. Spill beer in it, stick it in the dish washer. Air dry.
Patent troll nothing. Microsoft was caught red handed with code lifted *DIRECTLY* from the Quicktime codecs. This was not trolling with a concept or buying patents to then leverage against someone else, this was outright plagiarism.
The image quality is nowhere near what an SLR can deliver, but you are getting away from the original posters intent and my point of using the camera that you have to learn how to compose images. Sure, cell phone cameras are not going to have as many conveniences or the same image quality as a camera with a sensor larger than a pinhead (about the size of cell phone camera sensors), but you have it with you.
Ideally, I am waiting for a camera company to comet head on with Leica, but at lower prices. I just cannot justify a digital rangefinder in the $7-9 thousand range for the body alone when the image quality out of my Canon's is better. I wish I could as they are remarkably compact and discrete. The Fuji cameras are sooooo close. They need interchangeable lenses and slightly larger sensors, but I can easily see going with a solution like that when available.
Indeed. I regularly use two Canon 1D bodies and the associated lenses that can add up to over 30lbs of gear when on assignments, but I am not going to haul those bad boys around with me wherever I go. For lots of places, particularly when doing something like wearing a suit, a 1D and 70-200 f/2.8 is not always going to make the fashion police cut.;-)
He *might* not have a good camera in his cell phone... or he might not think about using it do learn more about photography... Why would you assume that he has?
I used to say that and carried a P&S with me wherever I went... Until the iPhone 4 came along. I've been really, really happy with the iPhone 4 camera never before posting images to Jonesblog from anything other than a dedicated camera until then.
To get me back in the point and shoot camera buying club, the camera companies are going to start to have to do something exciting again, like Olympus and Fuji are now doing with the larger sensor sizes.
A good cell phone camera... honestly. The best camera you can learn with is one that you will always have on your person. The latest cell phone cameras can make some really beautiful images: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/06/time-and-space/
When you are ready to go beyond framing and composition, then step up to a basic SLR like a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D40.
Magnetohydrodynamics has been around for quite a while and has long been one of the holy grails of submarine propulsion with prototypes existing now for years. During my last visit to a Los Angeles class submarine, this was a hot topic. Movement of ferrofluids is a natural extension of this concept with applications in everything from medical imaging to cooling of large and small objects. Its pretty exciting, though I am surprised that this is the *first* implementation of this.
The wording of this post makes it seem as though the data centers were initiated via policies of the Obama administration. However, the reality is that the data center expansion occurred during the policy of the previous Bush administration with funding requested in 2006, approved in 2007 and implementation initiated in 2008 a full year before the Obama administration took office. The Obama administration approved the continuation of the policy in 2009 and 2010 and are currently altering the data center strategy.
We certainly have not in the even very recent past, because we did not understand how biological systems were actually constructed/wired. This project is an attempt to solve that problem and one of the potential outcomes is a general purpose knowledge of connectivity that can be applied to computational problems.
The eyes do not "see" in the sense of processing information. They turn light into nerve impulses. Ho-Hum. We've got that, in fact this isn't about that at all. They are dealing with already captured data anyway.
Actually they do process information. The neural retina is like a miniature parallel supercomputer at the back of your eye that does initial signal processing from the photoreceptors through the over 50 kinds (200 in other invertebrates) of neurons.
Nothing in biology can be applied to this problem directly, only perhaps simple ideas applied rigorously. Stop spouting your favorite rubbish.
No offense friend, but I can't figure out if this is a troll or that you are simply uninformed here. Biological neural systems are *very* good at discriminating differences in data streams. Nested neural systems then further refine those abstractions and you get more advanced logic. The problem in the past has been discerning what those connectivities are as most current models of neural connectivity grossly underpredict the biological reality of neural circuit complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
Check into it and ask about the impact of retinal remodeling on potential interventions.
Nossir. That is not correct. See my comment just above.
Yes. Precisely.
[sigh].... do not feed the troll.... do not feed the troll...
OK, I'll feed the troll. Yes, I am acutely aware of Paul Bach-y-Rita's work. You however apparently do not understand the concepts that you are invoking. There is plasticity in neural systems, yes. Plasticity is important in vision, sure. Nobody, *anywhere* has demonstrated that they can generate coherent "visual percepts" in a coordinated fashion with any kind of stimulus. Its far more complicated than hooking up electrodes and stimulating until someone "learns" what the stimulus means.
btw, the tongue thing is very, very cool. Its not vision and does not even map to vision, but those lingual electrodes can easily map topographic data, sonar data, relief data, contrast data onto the high resolution innervation of the tongue and allow people to interpret those stimulii as a map to be followed. The technology was originally developed for US Navy SEALS to navigate complex 3D environments at night, with no light and it works. It works incredibly well with very little training necessary. I would like to see more effort and funds put into techniques like that to help people live more independent lives.
I am familiar with Nirenberg's work. What Nirenberg seems to be missing is that the programming outflow of the retina is altered in retinal disease. ON and OFF channels are substantially altered in retinal disease and the whole programming substrate is altered because the circuitry and programming down to the molecular levels is altered.
Its not all pessimism though as we will need to understand how the normal retina signals and I find her work to be interesting and compelling. Though she is not addressing *which channels* of information outflow are being encoded. There are 14-16 separate outflow channels in the retina that project to different areas of cortex and sub cortex and she is not addressing how to separate those channels and what those separate channels mean in terms of the "visual world".
This is just my point. While I understand that science and engineering has to start somewhere, they have made promises to this woman and done surgery to her, potentially increasing risks for other problems where I would argue there is no hope of "seeing" anything coherent.
Yes, we can do remarkable things with even an 8x8 pixel array, but this approach has no promise of even delivering that to this woman. The electrode cuff on the optic nerve simply stimulates too many neurons that are not coherent and those neurons project to far too many areas of cortex. A retinal implant that appropriately targets cell populations would be more appropriate as would genetic engineering of targeted opsins to other cell classes.
As for implants directly in the cortex, I might argue that this has a better chance of stimulating phosphenes that could be interpreted as vision. I've participated in some of that early work http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/08/bionic-implants/ and while I believe there are other approaches that will be more effective, that work still has some promise (particularly for motor interfaces).
Ah, ad hominem attacks from an Anonymous Coward... You will note that I am an "eye doctor". What are your qualifications to call someone else a clown?
We'll see... I would have liked to have seen some traditional methods of evaluation in animal models using psychophysics before moving directly to humans. Were I a betting man, I don't think the engineering is up to the biological task right now. A couple decades work already suggests that we don't yet understand how the information is coded to get into the brain.
Yeah, its easy for people to get enthused about rescuing vision loss. Its an important thing and keeps us working at all hours of the day as hard as we can to understand how the visual system works and how to fix it when it goes wrong. We've published before on this issue and I am sure they are aware of the work. My only concern is when promises are made to patients and expectations are built up that these devices will cure blindness when the biology has not been worked out and the engineering is predicated upon that imprecise understanding of the biology.
For the first part, see my comment to femto above.
As for the neurons changing their behavior, yes... that is exactly what I am saying. It definitely happens in the retina as the retina is reprogrammed and there is some evidence that it happens higher up as well. Though those precise studies have yet to be performed.
So, flashes of light are simply uncoordinated signaling by neurons. Turns out vision is far more complicated than the cochlear system that allows us to engineer bionic solutions for hearing. Provided the cochlea is intact, it is easy to stimulate those neurons in an appropriate manner that people can learn to interpret. Vision is another story entirely and unless you stimulate the *right* neurons with the *right* type of stimulation, its not gonna work.
So, which ganglion cell populations are they going to stimulate? The optic nerve contains from 14-16 classes of ganglion cells that project to different areas of brain. Its a tough tough problem because those ganglion cells and the axons in the nerves project not only to LGN, but also to a large number of subcortical areas like the SCN and tectum. Then what about the remnant signals that may be coming from peripheral regions of the retina (in cases of AMD) and central retina (in cases of RP)?
Again, they are moving forward with engineering without necessarily understanding the biology.
What they are claiming is that the bionic implant will work in a degenerate retina. The substrate circuitry has changed. No chance of it transducing vision... They are either going to have to intervene at an earlier time point (much earlier than most folks realize) or bypass the retina or reconstruct the retina. There is more biology at play here than a simple engineering project.
Note: This is *NOT* vision. This is an uncoordinated stimulation of neurons that is no more vision than poking your eye and seeing flashes of light or knocking yourself on the back of the head and seeing stars. Vision is a far more complicated matter and these investigators that are promoting this bionic chip have ignored or are ignorant of over a decade of research that shows the neurons in the eye change their wiring in response to retinal degenerative disease. When the wiring in the retina changes, it is no longer able to mediate normal retinal signaling...
Yes, I am a vision scientist.
Dude... I've been washing my keyboards for years. Spill coffee in them? Run EM under the tap and dry them out. Spill beer in it, stick it in the dish washer. Air dry.
Read about it yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation#Apple_v._Microsoft.2C_Intel.2C_and_San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
Patent troll nothing. Microsoft was caught red handed with code lifted *DIRECTLY* from the Quicktime codecs. This was not trolling with a concept or buying patents to then leverage against someone else, this was outright plagiarism.
The image quality is nowhere near what an SLR can deliver, but you are getting away from the original posters intent and my point of using the camera that you have to learn how to compose images. Sure, cell phone cameras are not going to have as many conveniences or the same image quality as a camera with a sensor larger than a pinhead (about the size of cell phone camera sensors), but you have it with you.
Ideally, I am waiting for a camera company to comet head on with Leica, but at lower prices. I just cannot justify a digital rangefinder in the $7-9 thousand range for the body alone when the image quality out of my Canon's is better. I wish I could as they are remarkably compact and discrete. The Fuji cameras are sooooo close. They need interchangeable lenses and slightly larger sensors, but I can easily see going with a solution like that when available.
Indeed. I regularly use two Canon 1D bodies and the associated lenses that can add up to over 30lbs of gear when on assignments, but I am not going to haul those bad boys around with me wherever I go. For lots of places, particularly when doing something like wearing a suit, a 1D and 70-200 f/2.8 is not always going to make the fashion police cut. ;-)
He *might* not have a good camera in his cell phone... or he might not think about using it do learn more about photography... Why would you assume that he has?
I used to say that and carried a P&S with me wherever I went... Until the iPhone 4 came along. I've been really, really happy with the iPhone 4 camera never before posting images to Jonesblog from anything other than a dedicated camera until then.
A fading light shot is here: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/10/evening-light/
and an indoor shot of the inside of an instrument is here:
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/12/gravity-probe-b/
To get me back in the point and shoot camera buying club, the camera companies are going to start to have to do something exciting again, like Olympus and Fuji are now doing with the larger sensor sizes.
A good cell phone camera... honestly. The best camera you can learn with is one that you will always have on your person. The latest cell phone cameras can make some really beautiful images: http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2011/06/time-and-space/
When you are ready to go beyond framing and composition, then step up to a basic SLR like a Canon Rebel or a Nikon D40.
Magnetohydrodynamics has been around for quite a while and has long been one of the holy grails of submarine propulsion with prototypes existing now for years. During my last visit to a Los Angeles class submarine, this was a hot topic. Movement of ferrofluids is a natural extension of this concept with applications in everything from medical imaging to cooling of large and small objects. Its pretty exciting, though I am surprised that this is the *first* implementation of this.
The wording of this post makes it seem as though the data centers were initiated via policies of the Obama administration. However, the reality is that the data center expansion occurred during the policy of the previous Bush administration with funding requested in 2006, approved in 2007 and implementation initiated in 2008 a full year before the Obama administration took office. The Obama administration approved the continuation of the policy in 2009 and 2010 and are currently altering the data center strategy.
We certainly have not in the even very recent past, because we did not understand how biological systems were actually constructed/wired. This project is an attempt to solve that problem and one of the potential outcomes is a general purpose knowledge of connectivity that can be applied to computational problems.
The eyes do not "see" in the sense of processing information. They turn light into nerve impulses. Ho-Hum. We've got that, in fact this isn't about that at all. They are dealing with already captured data anyway.
Actually they do process information. The neural retina is like a miniature parallel supercomputer at the back of your eye that does initial signal processing from the photoreceptors through the over 50 kinds (200 in other invertebrates) of neurons.
Nothing in biology can be applied to this problem directly, only perhaps simple ideas applied rigorously. Stop spouting your favorite rubbish.
No offense friend, but I can't figure out if this is a troll or that you are simply uninformed here. Biological neural systems are *very* good at discriminating differences in data streams. Nested neural systems then further refine those abstractions and you get more advanced logic. The problem in the past has been discerning what those connectivities are as most current models of neural connectivity grossly underpredict the biological reality of neural circuit complexity.