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A man walks out of a restaurant into the night and sees street lights and brightly lit shop windows. He’s so thrilled by the spectacle that he stands there for 10 minutes, just looking. The reason for his joy at such a mundane sight is the fact that he is normally totally blind.
The man is one of nine patients to have been fitted with an Alpha IMS device, the latest retinal prosthesis that can restore sight to blind people.
The image above is an X-ray of one of the patients, showing the implanted chip with wires running to it from the retina, with a dial behind the ear that can be used to adjust brightness. It is powered wirelessly via a battery in the pocket.
Such devices work only in patients who have lost their vision through diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa that destroy the light-detecting cells in the eye but leave the vision-processing neurons intact. The devices send signals directly to the brain.
The Alpha IMS joins the Argus II – the only other visual prosthesis to have so far undergone clinical trials. The Argus II was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration only last week and has also been adapted to allow blind people to read Braille by sight rather than touch.
But the two devices work very differently. The Argus II converts video from a camera on a pair of glasses into electronic signals “displayed” on a grid of 60 electrodes implanted over a person’s retina.
The Alpha IMS, on the other hand, detects light entering the eye instead of using an external camera, which means that a patient can look around by moving their eyes rather than always having to move their head.
It uses a grid of 1500 electrodes implanted underneath, rather than over, the retina: this offers higher resolution. It also makes use of the natural processing power of the neurons in the middle layer of the retina that process motion and contrast. [Proceeding of the Royal Society B]
Image by Institute for Ophthalmic Research, University of Tübingen
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No need for the healing hands of “The Jesus” any longer, we’ve solved it – with science!
I am absolutely chuffed about this and cannot express how pleased I am that people can suddenly enjoy things that the rest of us also enjoy.
ALL PRAISE SCIENCE!
We are not worthy.
This is genuinely amazing.
Thanks for covering this article, amazing.
As far as I know, it takes the signals from the eyes, sends them to a small computer attached to the persons belt, procceses them and then sends them back up to the brain.
I hope that in a few years this can become more common, hopfully with graphene super capasitors it cold all be inside the person. I no longer have to hope that blindness will be cured within my life as I now know that it will be.
Amazing stuff!
Interesting read on people given sight after being blind…
“When the bandages were removed … he heard a voice coming from in front of him and to one side: he turned to the source of the sound, and saw a “blur.” He realized that this must be a face…. He seemed to think that he would not have known that this was a face if he had not previously heard the voice and known that voices came from faces.”
…
“He had at first been unable to recognize any shapes visually-even shapes as simple as a square or a circle, which he recognized instantly by touch. To him, a touch square in no sense corresponded to a sight square.”
http://www.willamette.edu/~mstewart/whatdoesitmean2see.pdf
People who are given vision after being blind have to re-learn everything; they cannot just jump into sighted life. I for one assumed if you sat a blind man down and instantly gave him the ability to see, he would be amazed, stand up and start a new life taking in all the wonders of sight, the reality is surprisingly quite different.
This is really, really interesting. Trying to imagine that messes with me head
this is AMAZING NEWS.