Implant Gives Grayscale Vision To the Blind Using Lasers

MrSeb writes with a bit from Extreme Tech: "After a lot of theorizing, posturing, and non-human trials, it looks like bionic eye implants are finally hitting the market — first in Europe, and hopefully soon in the U.S. These implants can restore sight to completely blind patients — though only if the blindness is caused by a faulty retina, as in macular degeneration (which millions of old people suffer from), diabetic retinopathy, or other degenerative eye diseases. ... The Bio-Retina, developed by Nano Retina, is a whole lot more exciting. The Bio-Retina costs ... around the $60,000 [and] the 576-pixel vision-restoring sensor is actually placed inside the eye, on top of the retina. The operation only takes 30 minutes and can be performed under local anesthetic. Once installed, 576 electrodes on the back of the sensor implant themselves into your optic nerve. The best bit, though, is how the the sensor is powered: The Bio-Retina system comes with a standard pair of corrective lenses that are modified so that they can fire a near-infrared laser beam through your iris to the sensor at the back of your eye. On the sensor there is a photovoltaic cell that produces up to three milliwatts — not a lot, but more than enough."

It's not so great (yet)

[gr8_phk]

They claim a 24x24 pixel image. The video shows a low-resolution grey scale video of a kid on a swing. Looks fantastic if you consider going from blind to THAT. However I paused a frame and the kids head was 12 pixels wide. So the overall image is probably at least 120 to 240 wide - many times higher resolution than the device actually produces. So the video is not actually representative. With further advancements one can hope (expect?) that the resolution will increase over the years. Gives new meaning to "retina display".

Hopefully improved

[tsotha]

I'm hoping not only that resolution improves (and color, naturally), but why stop there? I wouldn't mind being able to see in UV bands and a telescopic lens would be nice.

Re:waiting for IPS repair options

[slew]

I'm not knocking the progress on this optical implant, but it only does greyscale and without serious microsurgery, will never stop being greyscale only. She needs full color to regain what she lost.

There's no reason to believe that fancy microsurgery is required in order to visualize color. As a trivial example, nearly all color digital cameras have color filter arrays embedded over a monochrome sensor (other than foveon/sigma). It's not a big stretch to imagine that a future revision of this chip could have a color filter array and your brain (visual cortex) could learn to recognize different spatial encoding patterns as different colors.

That's similar to what your brain does now (although the retina helps by doing some type of local opponent-color coding). If the color mapping isn't easy for your brain to learn and you need a mapping more like your original mapping, in the worst case, you could even make the sensor configurable (stimulate different nerves for different colors). Although if you did this "simply" the pixels might be slightly scrambled, but that could be compensated for by using a really high resolution sensor (all cameras have multi-megapixel sensors these days), and then recoding to a lower resolution for output to the optic nerve.

All these things can be easily done on the sensor chip itself w/o requiring more advanced surgical techniques... Ah the wonder of silicon technology...

P.S. Dibs on the patents for this (or at least prior-art on the idea)...

Re:Hopefully improved

[asdf7890]

You might find that the 576 pixels gives the patients better vision than you'd imagine. They'll not be driving or reading any small-print, but our eyes are not massively high res to start with and the brain does a ton of work to scan them around to put the scene together and enhancing the result "post-production". Of course compared to blind even if it isn't all that good it'll still be a massively life changing improvement.

Just think: in a few decades time "you'll go blind" will no longer be a threat to 14 years olds...