retinal prosthesis

The "bionic eye" - so long a dream of the future - is finally becoming a reality with retinal prostheses available to patients in both the US and Europe. However, clinical experience with these implants has made it apparent that the vision provided by these devices differs substantially from normal sight. Consequently, the ability to learn to make use of this abnormal retinal input plays a critical role in whether or not some functional vision is successfully regained. The goal of the present review is to summarize the vast basic science literature on developmental and adult cortical plasticity with an emphasis on how this literature might relate to the field of prosthetic vision...

Retinal prostheses aim to restore vision to blind individuals suffering from retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. These devices function by electrically stimulating surviving retinal neurons, whose activation is interpreted by the brain as a visual percept. Many prostheses are currently under development. They are categorized as epiretinal, subretinal, and suprachoroidal prostheses on the basis of the placement of the stimulating microelectrode array. Each can activate ganglion cells through direct or indirect stimulation...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Orbital exenteration is a disfiguring procedure performed for unresponsive orbital infections and control of recurrent benign tumours and malignancies arising from the eyelids (basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, conjunctival malignant melanoma), lachrymal glands (adenoid cystic carcinoma) or surrounding sinuses. In extremely rare cases the use of a prosthetic eye after enucleation can lead to anophthalmic socket tumours. We report the case of a 54-year-old man who had left eye enucleation due to recurring events of retinal detachment and who developed an invasive fast growing epidermoid carcinoma 30 years later...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

PURPOSE: To date, reviews of retinal prostheses have focused primarily on devices undergoing human trials in the Western Hemisphere and fail to capture significant advances in materials and engineering research in countries such as Japan and Korea, as well as projects in early stages of development. To address these gaps, this systematic review examines worldwide advances in retinal prosthetic research, evaluates engineering characteristics and clinical progress of contemporary device initiatives, and identifies potential directions for future research in the field of retinal prosthetics...

BACKGROUND: Epiretinal prosthesis is one device for the treatment of blindness, which target retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) by electrodes on retinal surface. The stimulating current of epiretinal prosthesis is an important factor that influences the safety threshold and visual perception. Stochastic resonance (SR) can be used to enhance the detection and transmission of subthreshold stimuli in neurons. Here, it was assumed that SR was a potential way to improve the performance of epiretinal prosthesis...

Millions of people around the world suffer from varying degrees of vision loss (including complete blindness) because of retinal degenerative diseases. Artificial retinal prosthesis, which is usually based on electrical neurostimulation, are the most advanced technology for different types of retinal degeneration. However, this technology involves placing a device into the eyeball, and such a highly invasive procedure is inevitably highly risk and expensive. Ultrasound has been demonstrated to be a promising technology for noninvasive neurostimulation, making it possible to stimulate the retina and induce action potentials similar to those elicited by light stimulation...

Spatial mapping, the location in space of a perceived location due to an implanted electrode's electrical stimulation is important in the design of visual prostheses. Generally, a visual prosthesis system consists of an implanted electrode array, an external camera that acquires the image, and a transmitter that sends the information to the implanted electrodes. In cortical visual implant, the layout of the implanted array in most cases does not match the retinotopic map and it is necessary to find the location of the percept of each electrode in world coordinates...

Visual prosthesis holds hope of vision restoration for millions with retinal degenerative diseases. Machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks could help in improving prosthetic devices as they could learn how the brain encodes information and imitate that code. This paper introduces an autoencoder-based approach for tuning thalamic visual prostheses. The objective of the proposed approach is to estimate electrical stimuli that are equivalent to a given natural visual stimulus, in a way such that they both elicit responses that are as similar as possible when introduced to a Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) population...

Retinal prosthetic devices can significantly and positively impact the ability of visually challenged individuals to live a more independent life. We describe a visual processing system which leverages image analysis techniques to produce visual patterns and allows the user to more effectively perceive their environment. These patterns are used to stimulate a retinal prosthesis to allow self guidance and a higher degree of autonomy for the affected individual. Specifically, we describe an image processing pipeline that allows for object and face localization in cluttered environments as well as various contrast enhancement strategies in the "implanted image...

BACKGROUND: A retinal prosthesis is designed to help the blind to obtain some sight. It consists of an external part and an internal part. The external part is made up of a camera, an image processor and an RF transmitter. The internal part is made up of an RF receiver, implant chip and microelectrode. METHODS: Currently, the number of microelectrodes is in the hundreds, and we do not know the mechanism for using an electrode to stimulate the optic nerve. A simple hypothesis is that the pixels in an image correspond to the electrode...

The degeneration of photoreceptors in the retina is one of the major causes of adult blindness in humans. Unfortunately, no effective clinical treatments exist for the majority of retinal degenerative disorders. Here we report on the fabrication and functional validation of a fully organic prosthesis for long-term in vivo subretinal implantation in the eye of Royal College of Surgeons rats, a widely recognized model of retinitis pigmentosa. Electrophysiological and behavioural analyses reveal a prosthesis-dependent recovery of light sensitivity and visual acuity that persists up to 6-10 months after surgery...

Spatial mapping, the location in space of a perceived location due to an implanted electrode's electrical stimulation is important in the design of visual prostheses. Generally, a visual prosthesis system consists of an implanted electrode array, an external camera that acquires the image, and a transmitter that sends the information to the implanted electrodes. In cortical visual implant, the layout of the implanted array in most cases does not match the retinotopic map and it is necessary to find the location of the percept of each electrode in world coordinates...

Visual prosthesis holds hope of vision restoration for millions with retinal degenerative diseases. Machine learning techniques such as artificial neural networks could help in improving prosthetic devices as they could learn how the brain encodes information and imitate that code. This paper introduces an autoencoder-based approach for tuning thalamic visual prostheses. The objective of the proposed approach is to estimate electrical stimuli that are equivalent to a given natural visual stimulus, in a way such that they both elicit responses that are as similar as possible when introduced to a Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) population...

Retinal prosthetic devices can significantly and positively impact the ability of visually challenged individuals to live a more independent life. We describe a visual processing system which leverages image analysis techniques to produce visual patterns and allows the user to more effectively perceive their environment. These patterns are used to stimulate a retinal prosthesis to allow self guidance and a higher degree of autonomy for the affected individual. Specifically, we describe an image processing pipeline that allows for object and face localization in cluttered environments as well as various contrast enhancement strategies in the "implanted image...

Retinal electrostimulation is promising a successful therapy to restore functional vision. However, a narrow stimulating current range exists between retinal neuron excitation and inhibition which may lead to misperformance of visual prostheses. As the conveyance of representation of complex visual scenes may require neighbouring electrodes to be activated simultaneously, electric field summation may contribute to reach this inhibitory threshold. This study used three approaches to assess the implications of relatively high stimulating conditions in visual prostheses: (1) in vivo, using a suprachoroidal prosthesis implanted in a feline model, (2) in vitro through electrostimulation of murine retinal preparations, and (3) in silico by computing the response of a population of retinal ganglion cells...

Several different approaches for restoring sight in subjects who are blind due to outer retinal degeneration are currently under investigation, including stem cell therapy, gene therapy, and visual prostheses. Although many different types of visual prostheses have shown promise, to date, the Argus II Epiretinal Prosthesis System, developed in a clinical setting over the course of 10 years, is the world's first and only retinal prosthesis that has been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and has been given the CE-Mark for sale within the European Economic Area (EEA)...

Photoelectric dye-coupled polyethylene film, designated Okayama University type-retinal prosthesis or OUReP™, generates light-evoked surface electric potentials and stimulates neurons. The dye-coupled films or plain films were implanted subretinally in both eyes of 10 Royal College of Surgeons rats with hereditary retinal dystrophy at the age of 6 weeks. Visual evoked potentials in response to monocular flashing light stimuli were recorded from cranially-fixed electrodes, 4 weeks and 8 weeks after the implantation...

Recent efforts to restore partial vision in blind patients have made significant progress. Currently, prosthetic design concentrates on stimulating as many foveal retinal ganglion cells as possible but is hampered by stimulation of the nerve fibre layer. This results in a nonvisuotopic arrangement of phosphenes (stimulation percepts). This article suggests that by extending the stimulation area well beyond the fovea and stimulating the nerve fibre layer, axons from any remaining ganglion cells in more peripheral regions of the retina (low acuity) can be used to generate a visuotopic map...