

Laser-powered bionic eye gives vision to the blind - doc4t
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132918-the-laser-powered-bionic-eye-that-gives-576-pixel-grayscale-vision-to-the-blind

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kellishaver
This is so very exciting. For the longest time, treatment of eye diseases has
gone a little like this:

Refractive errors? Wear some glasses, contacts, or have LASIK

Corneal diseases? Tricker because you need a donor, but corneal transplant.

Glaucoma? There's a handful surgeries for that depending on type, and a
plethora of drugs.

Cataract? I'll take an interocular lens, please.

Partially detached retina? There are moderately successful surgeries to
reattach it, rates of success depending a lot on the health of the retina.

Retinal diseases? Sorry, you're screwed.

My left eye was removed when I was in my teens, and the retina of my right eye
is damaged fairly extensively due to retinopathy (from being born 2mo
premature). It's lead to various complications over the years, as well.

My biggest fear is going blind. I nearly am, and I think I still have a little
PTSD from the last round of eye problems.

Now, 576 greyscale pixels isn't much, but it's only going to improve over
time.

It's really exciting to think that people in my situation, and possibly even
myself someday, will not have to face the prospect of total blindness from
retinal disease.

~~~
meshko
Yes, yes. It's not entirely clear whether this will work for retinal
detachments, but I really hope it will.

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marvin
Is there anyone on Hacker News who works with this kind of technology, and
knows what is holding this technology back from (1) higher resolution and (2)
color vision? Obviously that this gets approved is a great achievement, but
there is _huge_ room for improvement.

~~~
devindotcom
I wrote a few papers about this and have covered it a few times. The main
thing holding back this type of vision substitution is the reliability and
size of microelectrode arrays. You can get a 1080p camera inside the eyeball,
but you have to put that information through the normal process if you're
going to take advantage of the brain's vision systems. The earlier you put it
in the stream the better, and retinal cells are handily arrayed in a
predictable spatial pattern and the mechanisms of the cascades are fairly well
understood compared with later downstream stuff that occurs in the V areas of
the brain.

Stimulating the optic nerve directly is not really an option (too small, too
fine, too unpredictable) and much further in the process and you start
skipping critical parts of vision processing. That's why work on cortical
blindness will continue for many years after retinal blindness and the like
have been addressed.

That said, this stuff was far more experimental 10 years ago and now there are
probably a dozen serious research labs doing real life trials of these things,
but with different takes on power, input, encapsulation, and so on. It really
is exciting but these nonreactive, long-term microelectrode arrays need to be
improved if we're to get better resolution and finer control over things like
color and shading.

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simonh
Until they walk into a French McDonalds.

~~~
gosu
Pithy in-jokes are probably not what people want here.

~~~
praptak
I read the GP post as: _"The discussion about the French McDonald incident
shows that there might be a real clash between people wearing such aids and an
anti-camera culture."_

The above obviously contains a great deal of interpretation.

~~~
chipsy
I think many might not be aware of the incident, I haven't seen it get a huge
amount of coverage.

The original report:

[http://eyetap.blogspot.fi/2012/07/physical-assault-by-
mcdona...](http://eyetap.blogspot.fi/2012/07/physical-assault-by-mcdonalds-
for.html)

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DigitalJack
Here is a ted talk about reverse engineering the nerve impulse signals to
create these artificial retinas.

It's only about 10 minutes, but a fascinating video.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sheila_nirenberg_a_prosthet...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sheila_nirenberg_a_prosthetic_eye_to_treat_blindness.html)

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10dpd
This is exciting, but two questions:

Is the implant upgradable? Imagine in 2 years the resolution is doubled but
because your an early adopter, you're stuck with the original.

There's more to sight than light - eg when Jesus healed the blind dude in the
Bible it took two steps, the first to restore vision, a second to restore
perception.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> Is the implant upgradable?

I wonder how many blind people are going to hold off on this in the hopes that
it gets better in five years.

> a second to restore perception

I imagine that this is aimed at people who've gone blind, and therefore have
all the neural infrastructure to see and perceive; but it does raise an
interesting point of what would happen if you implanted this in someone who
was blind from birth. (It brings to mind deaf-from-birth people who have
rejected their aural implants, though I think that was largely due to the
crapiness of the state of technology at the time, everything sounded like it
was being shouted through a pipe full of tin foil and gravel.)

~~~
10dpd
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_from_blindness> provides a succinct
overview of Molyneux's Problem, a philosophical thought experiment that
attempts to address this very issue.

This quote is especially interesting from a 13 year old whose sight was
restored in 1728: "When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment
of distances, that he thought all object whatever touched his eyes (as he
expressed it) as what he felt did his skin"

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goatforce5
The simulated pixelated black and white image in the video is a lot higher
than the 25 x 23 resolution mentioned in the article.

~~~
maggit
I measured, and the simulated image in the video seems to have a resolution
somewhere around 100x55 pixels (giving them the benefit of errors in
measurement). Grossly misleading, if you ask me.

(Unless, of course, the pixel size is about representative and the brain
builds up a big image like we see. But that would be worth mentioning
explicitly..!)

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will_work4tears
When they make those glucose batteries small enough I can see they'd be useful
for this implant. I can't find the article with the output, but I'm thinking
it was like 5 mW and those glasses only output 3, so seems like it's doable.

Very exciting stuff. Now for curing baldness and letting me regrow my teeth.

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wwwtyro
That video is an advertisement straight out of a scifi flick.

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tocomment
So why is Europe faster at approving this technology than the US?

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jarito
European and US regulatory approval processes are very different. From what I
understand, one of the bigger differences is that some EU regulatory bodies
only require that a treatment be proven safe, not effective, whereas the US
requires both. This means that in the EU it is sufficient to prove that your
treatment is non-harmful, you are not required to prove that it actually
works. In the US, you have to do both which can take much more effort.

I'm sure there are other reasons and I'm not an expert, I just had a
discussion with a friend of mine that is an AIDS researcher about the drug
creation process and I was interested to learn of the difference.

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epikur
As someone with only one eye, this headline is misleading. But retinal
implants are still very cool.

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DrorY
I see that the video is from 2010. Is there anything newer since?

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basicallydan
This is freaking AWESOME.

Does anybody know what the most common type of blindness is?

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j45
Now this is innovation.

