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Silicon Retinal Implants Are Here 105

Posted by timothy from the what-do-you-see? dept.
Ant was one of the first to write with this news: "CHICAGO -- Illinois scientists said Friday they have successfully implanted silicon microchips beneath human retinas for the first time, a procedure that holds promise for millions of people with failing eyesight. Earlier this week, three patients who lost almost all of their vision from retinitis pigmentosa -- a hereditary condition in which the retina gradually degenerates -- became the first people to have an Artificial Silicon Retina implanted."
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Silicon Retinal Implants Are Here More

Silicon Retinal Implants Are Here

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  • Will these eyeMacs change colors once a year?

    o/~The girl with kaleidoscope eyes o/~
    ___

  • >I've done some implant work and talked with some >of the engineers who worked on retinal implants. >The implant goes in front of the photoreceptors. >Of course. It cannot fit behind.

    So it goes in front of the photoreceptors but behind the two nerve layers that are overlaid upon them? Or does it sit atop the retina itself, directly stimulating ganglion w/o the benefit of the horizontal/amacrine/bipolar cells?

    --Dan
  • Yeah... of course it aint gonna help... of course you know better than all these scientists... lets just bash the entire procedure instead of waiting a few weeks to find out how well it works. Yeah. Great.

    Pre-announcement (and hype) are tools of marketing, not science.

    How do you eat soup in the Matrix?

    Directly from the bowl.... after all, there aren't any spoons :)

  • Don't take it all so seriously! Why doesn't all people have a sense of humor?
  • Will they have to have special roads so that the people with implants don't have to drive by power lines?
  • I think the key is in the way how our brain is able to adapt to new situations. The image these cells deliver is certainly different from that of the real retina, but brain should be able to adapt.

  • The technology was featured at least twice before on Slashdot, and I saw it in a documentry over a year ago.

    Here's one of them, I can't find the better ones:

    I have to wonder if it will even help with retina detachments, the nerve endings wouldn't be there to interface with... it seems to be limited to helping people with perfect eyes, and degenerating retinas.

    So maybe some absolutely miniscule fraction of the poplulation can have blurry monochrome 60x60 pixel vision restored to them. Hopeless for reading... it might be good for navigating sidewalks with a cane.

  • This will probably surprise you, but 3,500 receptors is about what the human eye has. I'm not joking. Maybe I'm off by a bit, but that's about the figure. We see with such incredible resolution because our brain puts together lots of information in several different ways, and as long as we see something for more than a half second, the brain can gather enough information to create a high-quality mental image of what we're actually seeing in very poor resolution.

    No, I don't know how it works. I just know that it does.
  • Actually, in my games of CP2020, i made up a "spider" eyes implant that puts eyes around your head, and in your hands, with a computer that integrates the images and feeds them to your brain. Now you can see 360 and if you put your hands around something, you can see it from eveery side at the same time.
    It's even possible use with that nifty eyeball that you can leave somewhere... why go on surveillance patrol when you can see everything from bed!?

    Well, now that's really offtopic, but i had a sudden urge...
  • But you can use an X-ray gun as a lamp, and then you could have fun looking at transparent people and the like...
  • I wonder, someone knows what is the practical resolution of an average human eye?
    If these things work, they are going to improve a lot, just think of the posibilities of discerning things, say, 50 times smaller of what you can actually see... you could spot bacteries!
  • Unfortuantely it doesn't. The reason that all that we can see is visible light is due to the fact that only the wavelengths between ~400 and ~700nm are permeable to water. and water is what fills our eyeballs. Now, i don't know if you refilled your eyes with some other, more radiation friendly fluid, if the rods and cones in you eye could support the expanded range (but i doubt it). But once you did that, you could get a chip to enable outside frequencies.... pretty cool, eh?
  • I see I'm not the only person that might have a framed page of wired reflexes that fell out of my poorly bound Street Samurai handbook. Mostly, I put it in this extra frame because it just happened to fit in so well. Anyone else get a copy of the Street Samurai handbook with about 30 of the pages repeated? Were they all like that?
  • How long before they make a v-chip version of it that turns off in the presence of offensive material? Congress'll make the damned things compulsory. And you thought your peril-sensitive sunglasses were cool...

    Or better yet set the things up so you can "beam" stuff into a data port, so you can watch stunning 3d movies just like you were there, and you can watch it privately, to boot. 'Course, the cops'll all have little widgets they can just zap you with, leaving you blind until they arrest you. So many possibilities, so many possible abuses.

    --

  • I'm no Luddite, but I'm not too thrilled about the idea of making permanent modifications to my body. (Especially if those modifications replace existing organs.)

    I see a simpler solution: Tiny LCDs in contact lenses. The could be used with the eyes open, acting as a kind of HUD, or with the eyes closed, with some sort of backlight.

    We could practically do this today, couldn't we?
  • LSD reverses certain neurological pathways in the brain and conuses your senses into crossing over each other. What I was talking about is when your brain does not have all the relevent information to build a scene, it fills in the gaps based on the overall look of a scene.
  • Thanks for the(very good) link!
  • For starters, an authoritative source would be something about the human eye, rather than a CCD camera. The human brain has more image interpretation hardware and software than SGI and Adobe combined.

    Where's your link, anyway?
  • http://www.pseudoscience.org/eye-related.htm
  • You may not think 60*60 is much good, but for people with retina pigmentosis it is a godsend, and remember this is the first time it's been done, resolution can only improove. OK, it wount be what were used to, yet, but its a good start. My half sister cant have a male child beause of far that the RP will be passed down from her father, he is completely blind, with this technology perhaps her daughters will be able to. In adition to this "Doctors hope the implants will stimulate the retina so patients develop some vision. " We wont know how good vision is for a few weeks, and you're right, like any new procedure, theres a long way togo, but its a way of hope for the 30,000,000 affected (not just geeks that want to see there kernel compling as they walk down the high street - although "Geordi" like implants could be a possiblity, although I wouldnt change my real eyes.)
  • That, and IR vision (switchable of course). Oh, and various crosshairs that I can turn on when Im really annoyed at someone....
  • I am THERE! Sure, it's a few years away. But imagine that, after waiting since I was a little boy looking in the back of cominc books, to finally get those x-ray goggles. Only they will actually be my own eyes! yee haw!! 8 )
  • great, first we had silicon breast implants, now this? I can see it now. "Look at the eyes on that one, whooee!"

  • One wonders what effect this technology would have on the retina scan identification tech being developed elsewhere...


    --
    Repton.

  • Let the overclocking begin!!! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Story From Slashdot 2010:

    "Overclocking Eyeballs With Liquid Nitrogen"

    "Decided that your 3400x2700 27" flatscreen monitor isn't giving you the best possible Q5 Arena experience? These two did."

    "By hooking up a direct feed from the motherboard, and submerging their own eyeballs in liquid nitrogen, they were able to acheive a maximum resolution of 5700x4200, with 180 fps framerate! We need a beowulf cluster of these linked up to Natalie Portman immediately!"


    Score -1 (Off-rocker)

  • I was arguing with a med student about a month ago about the possibility of robotic eyes. He was dead-set in the belief that it wasn't possible.

    I'm fully aware that this isn't exactly it either, but it's close enough for what we were arguing about. How long until I get to shoot lethal concentrated laser beams from my eyes? :-P

  • Well, I think you're being a bit hasty but I can see your point. The article is very short on the basis for why this type of implant would stimulate retinal growth and therefore is open for question. Considering it came from Wired I didn't expect much detail or depth, lets just hope that a more detailed report hits the mainstream news and clears up some of the details.

  • Here are links to the Retinal Implant Project [mit.edu] which was a joint Harvard-MIT collaboration. Another link here [augeninfo.de](in German)leads to the page of German researchers on the same project. Here's an article [aiche.org] that describes the project in a little detail.

    Interesting project, it seems they've been working on this for 10 or more years in joint collaboration with several universities in different countries as well as the government.

  • Whoops... Correction. The old one required external prosthetics.

  • What is up with you people?

    Sure, I can see reading the article and having questions about the technology. It is pretty light on technical facts, so if you are a technically minded person, you are likely to have unanswered questions about the feasibility of the devices. However, it is incredibly short sighted to assume, since your question wasn't answered in the Wired article, that the research must therefore be useless and the trials are doomed to fail.

    It is quite likely that there are some very intelligent people (maybe even smarter than you! It's possible!) working on this project, who have likely spent a large part of their life working on this type of research.

    I don't mind the "I wonder how they will deal with XXX" posts, but who here is so familiar with the REAL journal publications and the actual research that they can say "I doubt this will work due to XXX".

    Also, why do people keep complaining about the low pixel count? This is the FIRST time this sort of thing has been tried. Are 3500 pixels better than 0? Maybe we should start knocking artificial limbs, since they obviously pale in comparison to the real ones. And get rid of those stupid wheelchairs, they're nowhere near as good as walking.

    I, for one, am very excited by this sort of progress.
  • Game Boy has a 1 MHz Z80-compatible CPU, four audio channels, and a display with 160x144 pixels that can be set to any of four brightness levels (Game Boy; Game Boy Pocket) or any of 32,768 colors (Game Boy Color).

  • What's next? (Score:3)

    by kwsNI ( 133721 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @06:27AM (#964308) Homepage
    Great. Just what everyone needs. Silicon implants for your eyes ;) You'll be walking down the street and everyone is just going: "Oh my God, look at her eyes. They are so big." What I really want to know is, can you be like Pamala Lee and have them taken out when you get tired of them or just want more publicity?

    And there's also been the headlines recently about that plastic surgeon that placed breast implants into the ass of some women that wanted a bigger but. What's next, installing optical implants into someone's ass?

    kwsNI

  • is that just as I read this post, MDFMK's "Stare at the Sun" started. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....

    --Perianwyr Stormcrow
  • On K5 [kuro5hin.org], you choose the stories.
  • So it goes in front of the photoreceptors but behind the two nerve layers that are overlaid upon them? Or does it sit atop the retina itself, directly stimulating ganglion w/o the benefit of the horizontal/amacrine/bipolar cells?

    Outside all retinal layers. Amacrine, horizontal, and bipolar cells are not really figured in. Ganglion cells are the target.
  • OW!!! I've got a bunch of sand in my eye!!
  • i get the joke fuckwit. it's lame. apparently you need to read it again.
  • Now if they could only do something with people who don't have a sense of smell.

    Oh, HAH! That was stupid of me..

    What WEIRDOS don't have a sense of smell?!
  • Oh please... spare me...
  • Totally agree with you!
  • It's A LOT more that 3500! Just take a look at http://www.imec.be/bo/ccd/evs.html [www.imec.be]! But it is true that the brain fills in information missing.
  • wired mag predicted this 2 years ago in an article [wired.com] entitled "Tomorrow Today". Not bad. they predicted solar cell artificial retinas in y2k.
  • I see. This is a very illuminating and eye opening article. I've clearly seen visions of this t"eye"pe of thing coming around. In order to view all the options, one must keep an eye on the proceedings and remain focused on the outcome. Ran out of puns, sorry... --
  • Just 3500 microscopic solar cells?! That means a resolution of about 59 x 59...! Oh well... it's a start anyhow..
  • Ahh :) Does this mean I soon can get my X-Ray vision?! ;)
  • Hmm...let's extrapolate here for a second...Digital optic interfaces could only lead to someone somewhere making a chip such that I can watch TV directly from my eyes...hmmm, then companies start to pay an even larger premium for advertising space literally in my eyeballs, and the world goes to hell?

    Or perhaps hackers figure out nifty ways to broadcast at some odd frequency, whatever, to disrupt the chips, and we all go blind -- the world goes to hell?

    Yep, I think it's pretty clear: we're all going to die now.

  • vision. (Score:3)

    by grizzo ( 138368 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @01:26AM (#964323)
    having pretty horrible vision myself, this surgery all sounds very interesting. my optomitrest recently commented that my eyesight was getting worse more quickly than anyone's he'd ever seen before-- this bothered me. so what i'm left to wonder is, how much will this damned surgery cost? because i'm sure my insurance will find a way around paying for it... and when that happens, will only the very rich be able to afford good eyesight???

    i feel as if right now i am at a defecit to the seeing population of the world... what happens when the rich people are the only ones who can afford to "fix" their bodies so they function properly???

  • Okay, having read the article, one word springs to mind: OUCH!

    That whole thing - cutting open your eyes - I'm not afraid to admit to feeling a little squeemish about that one. And getting it done so that you can watch TV? The really scary part is that some people would actually do that. Surgery to watch TV without needing that big ol' box.

    Have to agree with you. We are all going to die now.

    Damn. I had plans next week...

  • Virtual Reality (Score:3)

    by TheSacrificialFly ( 124096 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @01:38AM (#964325)
    This has some pretty cool implications for virtual reality: if scientists can figure out how to hook into the vision nerves, and this looks like a great start, we could soon "plug in" matrix style (although hopefully without the agonising pain) to external visual inputs.

    The implant itself, while the benificiaries seem to be from only one kind of eye problem for the time being, seems to be an indicator of a coming rush of "bionic" implants that will change the way humans live, or at least wealthy humans. I seem to remember reading many science fiction books that project this future...

    I for one am looking forward to reading slashdot by subvocalising (Andrew Wiggan style) a command to the implanted screen in my eye, and seeing it as a "full screen" 3d panoramic view, where the full screen is just that... an all encompassing virtual view.

    tsf.
  • Whenever I get a fleck of something in there, I get some vicious eyestrain. It hurts to even think about sticking electronics in there. Although, you know we'll all need them someday. I had better than 20/20 my whole life, right up until I found my love of computers. Now I'm lucky if I can find the can in broad daylight. Sharkey
    www.badassmofo.com [badassmofo.com]

  • cyberoptics (Score:3)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @01:39AM (#964327) Homepage Journal
    Remember when assigning options for your cyberoptics if you want to get full function from your smartgun(tm) link you must have the Image Enhancement(tm), Anti-Dazzle(tm) and Targeting Scope(tm) options. Of course you will need at least one times square marque, IR optic, Telescopic, Macro, Night vision, UV optic, Thermographic and SHF (radar optic). Since all Cyberoptics only contain 4 option spaces and the first three are taken, You must have at least 7 eyes.

    Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

    Oh, never mind I just imagined it and it wasn't that exciting...

  • but just sticking microchips in there ain't gonna do much.

    I'm sure I could stick one of those "spy"-style minicams into someone's eye socket, too, and it would produce just as many results as the current procedure is likely to.
  • Here's an article [devicelink.com] from about a year ago on artifical silicon retinas. Includes some info and a photo of the chips used in this current study.

    Check out bottomquark [bottomquark.com] to discuss the latest science news.
    GrnArrow

  • It's not a microchip (Score:5)

    by donutello ( 88309 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @01:45AM (#964330) Homepage
    It's a photoelectric cell that generates electrical stimulation similar to the kind that a retina would on being struck by light. This is NOT a microchip. There is no processing or logic involved.
  • I think you'd need some kind of virtual boundry to that screen, and a simulation of distance so that your brain could cope. I can't imagine being able to process and read an image at zero distance that takes over my entire field of vision.

    --
  • How long will it take before we look just like the Borg??
  • Say, weren't there characters in Dune with metallic eyes who were shunned? Another example of Sci-Fi foreshadowing reality.
  • That would give you slightly better resolution than a Nintendo Gameboy. Perhaps that could be the perfect item for the patients to use to see if it fully works or not.

    Or, 1/3rd of a palmpilot.
  • I for one do not want someone to be able to hack into my eyes and put a virus there.. "Warning: if you receive an email entitled ILOVEYOU, do not open your eyes! The virus will otherwise change some parameters in your registry - possibly causing you to develop breasts and/or an extra head - as well as passing itself on to anyone within your eyesight. If you receive the ILOVEYOU virus, please keep your eyes shut for the rest of your life. Thank you."
  • The retinal scanners would send a message to the vision chip, and the vision chip would detect it and radio its serial number to the scanner.
  • Only $2 and 1500 Bazooka Joe comics. What are you waiting for, legal advice?
  • the fact that a Borg character is /.'s icon for Microsoft stories [slashdot.org].
  • I read about something similar to this a year or so ago, there was this totally blind guy who had some kind of camera implant, that made it possible for him to at least tell the difference between light/dark...

    According to him it was a great improvement, I dunno, never been blind, but sounds reasonable.

    In that case a 60 x 60 resolution would probably be heaven for these poor ppl...

    --

    "I'm surfin the dead zone
  • Now I can finally get my IR & UV - vision... Fully possible as soon as they have refined the technology a "little"... ;)

    X-ray might be a little more difficult... Then you would have to bring an emitter or something like that... And I don't think ppl would enjoy you radiating them all over...

    --

    "I'm surfin the dead zone
  • Yep, one of the many cool toys developped by the evil Bene Tleilax. Of course, emperor Muad'Dib didn't need those after losing his eyes in a nuclear explosion because of his precognition powers. I guess we now know what these Illinois scientists wille be up to once they'll have that project that project :)))
  • I'd think for good virtual reality (Where you're totally immersed in a virtual world) you'd want direct brain interaction and the tech should also keep your body immobilized. It'd kick ass for augmented reality like the stuff the guys at the MIT wearable page are doing. Assuming you could have it talk to a computer en route to your brain...

    Can't wait to be a borg... ;-)

  • Don't take it all so seriously! Why doesn't all people have a sense of humor?

    Because my wife has RP? Because every time I ask her what she wants the answer is always "to see like I used to"?

    This isn't bullshit like the latest M$ conspiracy to control the world. This isn't pie-in-the-sky genetic research. This isn't try to land on a planet 100 million miles away. This is real-life. This is something that effects millions of people.
  • First off, to see at a greater resolution I guess you also need more nerves from your eyes to your brain, and that might be tricky? But I don't know about that.. a zoom would have been nice ;)
    Anyway... for information of the resolution, check http://www.imec.be/bo/ccd/evs.html [www.imec.be]. Or, taken from the web site: Resolution: #pixels: 120M clones; pixel pitch: 2-3 m; focal plane size: 3 cm.
  • The first Idaho ghola had metallic eyes. These where also used for the Feydakin who lost their eyes because of the stone burner bomb. Of course, Paul didn't need them since he's prescient...
  • This is NOT a microchip. There is no processing or logic involved.

    Is it a chip? Are the components really really small? hmm.. what should we call it..

    I think you meant to say it's not a Processor (which nobody claimed it to be)

  • The reason that all that we can see is visible light is due to the fact that only the wavelengths between ~400 and ~700nm are permeable to water.

    Umm... doesn't a doctor's x-ray pass through your (water-filled) body?

    Not that I think the x-ray vision idea would work anyway...

    - Isaac =)

  • Aww, this sucks... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And just when I was going to get my rectal implants installed...
  • Hmmm... 120M cones? I find that very difficult to believe. I suppose I might be off by an order of magnitude, but not 4 1/2 orders of magnitude. I remember some stuff from science class back in 4th grade, and it's amazing how much we can see with what should be terribly inadequate hardware.

    The human eye can actually only directly perceive 12 different shades of green. Still, something happens in the software that we can tell the difference between 64k color and 16.7M color.

    Can someone find a page that's about the human eye, rather than about CCDs? It's not that yours wasn't informative, but it flies in the face of what I've read elsewhere, and I'd like an authoritative opinion.
  • I'm guessing it's not full-color-ultra-hi-rez that humans normaly have... but can their eyes do things that normal eye's can't? IE Infa-red vision, etc (like sony's night shot cams).

    My guess is 'no', but I certanly think it would be cool :P
  • It IS true that we have >100 million rods and cones. The fact that we can't tell between shades of green as well as we can tell between shades of blue or red is because of the relative sensitivity of the eye to different wavelengths. Also we are more sensitive to contrast than to intensity. This is the reason that you can differentiate between 65K and 16.7M color displays. With 65K the colors of neighboring pixels are not close enough sometimes so the contrast is a little bigger, but that makes a big difference to the eye.
  • I have to agree about the money issue...that will cause problems. But, on the other hand, I have had to watch my best friend lose what little bit of her eye sight she had over the past couple of years. She is 20 years old, has RP, and is having problems in our vision-centered world. Most of us take for granted our eyesight, or those of us that wear glasses say we have 'shitty' eyesight, but she would give almost anything to be able to see, even just a little. When someone tells you "I lost my color vision the other day...I've only been seeing black and white shades since then." it's kinda hard finding what to say when you can see all those beautiful colors. This offers hope to all of those out there that need it. Even if she will never be able to afford it, it will make her happy to know that if her children inherit RP from her, they will probably be able to have restored vision some day.
  • I saw some report about these chips a while back, obviously the resoloution is very bad, and its only B/W... it's to be used for patients that cant see at all, so for them it'll defenitely be an improvement anyway... plus the fact that it'll probably be improved on since it's only in an experimental statge.
  • Man, I can't wait to see how this turns out on the coming weeks! If this works, they might be able to use this same type of procedure to help out other eye conditions. My sister has some pretty bad scarring in one of her eyes which they can't fix with surgery, but I'm wondering if the reason they can't currently fix it isn't because of the scarring itself, as they are apparently getting pretty handy with retinal transplants, so maybe a related procedure to this could help. Does anyone have further information on this procedure and what else it may be applied to in the future, such as the damage caused by glaucoma?

    Deo
  • Yeah... of course it aint gonna help... of course you know better than all these scientists... lets just bash the entire procedure instead of waiting a few weeks to find out how well it works. Yeah. Great.
  • Interesting concept, however, in reading some of the posts here, it seems as though ppl are under the assumption that this would correct optical impairments (e.g., astigmatism, near/far-sightedness, etc.). From what I can gather in the Wired article, this would only fix retinal problems. To correct for various other optical impairments would require much more CPU horsepower than these cells seem to be able to muster. (remember how Hubble needed that optical correction unit to fix its vision problem?)

    Also, whether or not the user of this device would be able to see in color in the affected area could be called into question. The article makes no mention of it. I would venture a guess that the current version of the chip does not allow the user to see in color.

    Nevertheless, imo, this is a very promising technology. Perhaps if or when the technology is developed, we will be able to have our retinas replaced by similar technology. Perhaps we can even have small CPUs implanted behind the eye socket that will be able to correct for optical deformities in the eye itself rendering contacts and glasses obsolete.

  • Silicon Implants seem to be poping up everywhere...

    First the Chest, now the eyes, geez.

    CHICAGO - Pamela Anderson Lee is the first of a line of celebrities to have the latest and greatest silicon implants installed. Apparently she feels insecure about the sides of her retinas. Pamela declined to comment, but a rather baffled scientist at the institute was quoted: "What kind of crack is she smoking?"

    And they're off... Its (0: Troll), no, now its (1: Funny), how will it end?
  • > That whole thing - cutting open your eyes - I'm not afraid to admit to feeling a little squeemish about that one.

    I guess that being (near) blind probably helps to overcome that fear.

    --
    Matthijs
    ** Do you know EVERYthing there is to know about your idol? **
    http://www.fanpagesindex.com/ [fanpagesindex.com]
  • true true, but there is another effect at work here, you brain has a strange effect on image processing, you have to remember that you are not processing stills but actually motion video, the brain can take partial video information over a period of time and stitch it together to tell you what you are looking at. it really dosen't help the initial crappy quality you'll see but you should be able to read.

    Take a digital movie and compress the **** out of it, ok any one frame is unreadable, now watch the movie, though irratating you definately see whats going on (for the most part).

    Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
  • From the story:

    "The chip contains about 3,500 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. "

    Now, by my maths that would give the eye a "resolution" of about 60x60 pixels. And that's assuming that it's black and white rather than colour that the implant allows viewing in. If it is in colour, assuming one receptor for each of Red/Green/Blue, you're down to about 34x34. I don't know about you, but with that sort of vision resolution I'd just about be able to tell light levels and maybe buildings, if the ywere big/near enough. It's not quite up to human-style vision or even something which can be useful for any particular task other than "seeing" big objects.

    Also, someone further down the thread mentioned using these combined with microchips to correct for other deficiancies of the eye, such as short-sightedness. How? The details have already been lost. Additional lenses on the outside of the eye are used to prevent the loss of the detail, not to fill it in again. Try this:

    Take a digital photo, any digital photo and load it into you favourite image editor. Now scale it down to 10% of its previous size, and scale that back up again. The image will be blurred, and there won't be any way of getting that lost detail back no matter how hard you tell it to interpolate from the shrunken image.

    In short, even if these things did have a good resolution, they wouldn't be useful for the things people have been suggesting.

    --
  • Has anyone here tried this method? I'm finding some improvement in my myopia, but I'd like to know if anyone has returned to ~20/20.

    One word of caution, a number of badly trained people are practicing as Bates teachers. These are mostly the ones who believe Bates method is an 'alternative' therapy. Your best bet is to read a number of books on the Bates method and, if you still feel that you need someone to supervise you, assess the practitioner on the basis of your newfound knowledge. Otherwise, the books and a little willpower are all you need.

    Some books I would recommend:
    The Bates Method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses | William Horatio Bates | Henry Holt (Paper) | 080500241
    Relearning to See | Thomas R. Quackenbush | North Atlantic Books | hardback:1556432054 paperback:1556433417
    Check out the uppermost review of Quackenbush's book. [amazon.com]

    Regret for the past is a waste of spirit

  • Interesting, but.... (Score:3)

    by seanmeister ( 156224 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @05:27AM (#964362)
    There's more to vision than a functioning eye. The brain's got to know what to do with it! I've had severe amblyopia [yahoo.com] in my left eye for most of my life.. not really a retinal problem, but the doc told me that even if I underwent surgery to correct the physical problem, the chances of the nerve connections regenerating are slim. If the condition that this chip is treating is the result of a gradual degeneration of the retina, wouldn't the nerve connections gradually degenerate as well? Guess we'll have to wait and "see" how this procedure works out..
    seanmeister
  • ... we might have eyeMacs?

    "eye" Macs.. iMacs...get it....?

    groooooan...
    seanmeister

  • I wouldn't mind having breasts and/or an extra head :)
  • It sounds like this is just a preliminary experiment, kind of a proof of concept thing. I'm sure the final resolution will be higher, but for now it doesn't make sense to plaster lots of chips on someone's retina if you're not sure that they'll even be able to tolerate (not reject) them. Best to start off with one low density chip (that's cheap and easy to implant) until you're sure it's going to work.

    BTW I agree that this type of implant is clearly *not* intended for correcting simple vision problems, which are the result of lens/focus abnormalities. Perhaps some people are confusing this with the "adaptive optics" story a while back.

  • The straight dope on this procedure (Score:5)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @05:49AM (#964366)
    The article states that this procedure is only for retinitis pigmentosa, but in the end, it is not a treatment for RP, but an early biocompatibility test. RP is only a useful physiological test bed that renders the patient blind over large areas of the retina, while leaving most of the retinal structure intact. The patient was undoubtedly a research volunteer, and was aware of all this, and should probbaly more properly be coinsdered a 'subject' (but I hate calling patients that).

    As you probably recall from elementary school, there are two types of receptors in the eye. Rods handle B/W vision, are more sensitive to light, and are responsible for night and peripheral vision. Cones handle color vision, and are only found in the central areas of the visual field, especially the area of best vision in the eye, fovea centralis. (not to be confused with a nearby region of *no* vision, the macula lutea or 'blind spot' where the optic nerve enters the retina). Simple layman diagrams and links to useful concepts (but not *absolutely* accurate) can be found at:
    http://hyperphysics.p hy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html [gsu.edu]
    http://hyperphysics .phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html [slashdot.org]
    Here's a good anatomical overview of the eye [149.142.90.241]

    RP is a group of genetic diseases which cause the rods to degenerate. about ten different mutation have been linked to forms of RP, which can be dominant, recessive, or X-linked. Initially, the patient loses their peripheral vision, beginning in a single region, then gradually spreading. The fovea centralis is the last region to be affected, if ever, because there are few rods in the fovea. It is not clear if loss of sharp central vision is due to 'pure' RP at all, since mutations in some 'RP' genes can cause macular degenerations or other retinal conditions. It appears that the loss of central vision is dependent on the individual's particular mutation.

    The retina is laid out in layers, and in very different way that you might imagine. The photo sensors are in the *back* of the retina, and in front of them are several layers of neurons that allow the sensors to integrate (share info between nearby sensors, etc) and in front of that are the blood vessels a snd the neurons that go from the interneurons into the optic nerve, etc. Light passes through all these layers before hitting the rod and cone sensors. The only things that are 'behind' the sensors are the pigmented (choroid) layer, a black layer that absorbs all leftover light to keep it from bouncing around the eye; and the sclera, the tough "white of the eye" that provides support.
    [Slides and images [indiana.edu]]
    [Good slide, exlanations, links, [upenn.edu] but a bit technical]

    So why use this implant in RP? Well, by prying apart the layers of the retina as described, the sensors can be placed where the cones used to be, and with a bit of luck, the overlying layers of interconnecting neurons will remain intact (they are presumably unaffected by the rod-destroying mutations, since 'cone' vision is preserved in RP) All this is done in the periphery of the eye, away from the delicate Fovea and macula. Here it can be tested, through the (largely) intact eye, without significantly affecting the patient's remaining natural vision (though there's always some risk)

    This implant links into the web of interneurons in the retina, instead of having to be connected to the optic nerve as the native rods and cones do. You can see how this is easier than trying to do delicate neurosurgery on the optic nerve, and then re-training the patient's visual cortex. This is the most 'natural' process for th patient, since all position info is preserved and the preprocessing of the retina is present (ther preprocessing has two purposes: feedback to nearby sensors, which is lost in man-made sensors, and pre-processing of the visual impulses, which is preserved)

    However, a low resolution 'pinhead' sensor on the periphery won't help an RP patient at all. In fact, patients sometimes find patchy remnants of peripheral vision distracting and annoying. Clearly this is not a treatment for RP but an early stage biocompatibility test for later work (that is more likely to be useful in other conditions).

    Here's a review article [vard.org] on progress and challenges in similar subretinal implant technologies

    (Disclaimer: I published some research on retinal layers as an undergrad, but that was almost 20 years ago, and before I went to medical school)
  • Typical slashdot! Wired had this story two years ago!

  • Hello,

    I was just wondering does this photoelecric cell, convert the impulse that the cell generates into signals that are recogniseable by the brain. From what I read in the article, th doctors won't know if it has been successful for a couple of months.

    What I mean is Did the doctors know that these photoelectric cells generate the same type of signal that the retina generates. It could mean that the people may come to look at something and not be able to recognise it because the signal from the photoelectric cell was just slightly different from that of the retina and therefore giving a totally different Image.

    Another thing would this mean that some peoples arguments that the colors you see are different to the colors I see because of the way the eye and brain work (ie My recognition of purple may be different to yours, where I see purple you see green and this would be normal to you becasue your brain has developed to recognise these colors and take them for granted) is flawed becasue surely a photoelectric cell is going to give the same signal when it sees green no matter what. or I am just tottaly confused.


    thanks for your time

    Paul Kinlan p.s if you can, please visit http://www.pcbware.co.uk/hosting
    -
  • Try this one day when you are bored at work. Stare at the celing tiles with unfocused eyes, and you will notice the pattern completely takes over your FOV. This is because your brain is filling in the gaps with what it thinks is there based on color and light cues. If you try, you can even make items in your periphery completely blend away.
  • no. if the xray passed through, the film would be completely exposed... since they are partially blocked, that is why x-ray photography of the human body works... if they passed straight through, you'd just see a totally black slide....
  • So there's another wide open hacking opportunity here: black market retinal implants that provide a user defined response to retinal scanners. Cool.

  • Some Biological Background (Score:5)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @02:34AM (#964375) Homepage
    Among (far too many) other interests, human perception is a major fascination of mine. I had the good fortune to take a perception class last quarter, and we studied much of how the visual system functions. Here's a bit of what's going on:

    Most of vision is not, in fact, provided by the whole of the retina. The fovea, which is (optimally) the direct point of focus for light reaching the back of the eye, is also about the size of a pinhead--yet, it contains about half of our photoreceptors. We actually see very little of a scene at any given time; our eyes essentially "paint the fovea" with a strip of images in normal viewing and jitter around for focused viewing, such that the brain has a large amount of content to stitch together and the photoreceptors/neurons don't tire from lack of signal change.

    We filter out constant signals automatically, like the hum of your PC you just noticed when I brought it up.

    What my major concern is, I can't particularly figure out where this implantation is taking place, in terms of thickness. The nerves that actually carry the visual system through the optic nerve to the striate cortex are in front of, not behind, the existing photoreceptors. You've got two layers of nerves sitting in front of the photoreceptors, and they're placing the chip behind? This makes me wonder whether they're trying to stimulate or amplify existing photoreceptor activity--which leads to all sorts of questions regarding intensity, variance, signal matching, and so on. Did they solve the electrical potential problem? Supposedly you can't interface an electrode with a nervous system for too long, or you kill the nerve. Maybe the size of the implant helps here too--it's not impossible to imagine that this little fleck of a chip is being placed among photoreceptors?

    Does anybody know more about this system? I'm getting really burnt on stories about interesting tech with no quality links. *sigh*

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • Company that developed the retina in question... (Score:4)

    by CrusadeR ( 555 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @02:45AM (#964377) Homepage
    Here's the original press release:
    http://www.uic.edu /depts/paff/opa/releases/retinas_advisory.html [uic.edu]

    And the company mentioned in the PR, Optiobionics [optobionics.com], has a FAQ (which addresses questions of resolution and perception quality for potential patients... in short, they're not sure yet, but it won't be all that great) here [optobionics.com].
  • Optobionics rather... grrr *gets daily caffeine supplement*

  • Re:Some Biological Background (Score:3)

    by blakestah ( 91866 ) <blakestah@gmail.com> on Saturday July 01, 2000 @02:55AM (#964379) Homepage
    Does anybody know more about this system? I'm getting really burnt on stories about interesting tech with no quality links. *sigh*

    I've done some implant work and talked with some of the engineers who worked on retinal implants. The implant goes in front of the photoreceptors. Of course. It cannot fit behind. Stimulation will be bipolar across the retinal surface.

    One should proceed through this press release with much caution. Making implants work is not exactly like falling off a log. It will take 5-6 generations until they get a stable product that really works well and is not rejected, and has high enough resolution to work.

    Ultimately though, this problem is extremely tractable and will allow blind people to see again, just as cochlear implants now allow deaf people to hear.

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