8 ms·

A device to restore vision to the blind is being prepared for clinical trials

136 points by letientai299 6y ago

fjfaase 6y ago
Original source: https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/opening-eyes-to-a-frontier-in-vision-restoration https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/opening-eyes-to-a-front...
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Nice, it's sad to see blog spam of blog spam :-) Dang can you swap the link for this one? The current one is a repost of a techcrunch one which is a summary of this one.
- dang 6y ago
  Changed from https://mondestuff.com/til/doctors-are-preparing-to-implant-the-worlds-first-human-bionic-eye/ https://mondestuff.com/til/doctors-are-preparing-to-implant-.... Thanks!
heyflyguy 6y ago
I'm still waiting for my thermal/multispectral/variable zoom contact lens.
- curiousgal 6y ago
  And improved batteries And more efficient solar cells And enamel reconstruction ...
  - craftinator 6y ago
    And affordable healthcare
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Europeans already solved that one back in the 40s and 50s.
- rzzzt 6y ago
  (muffled Six Million Dollar Man theme song playing in the distance)
ksach 6y ago
Haven't there been other implants before? I just know that they weren't that successful yet but people were at least able to see some patterns, if I remember correctly.
tyingq 6y ago
"Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light (phosphenes)" Does that mean a total of 172 "pixels" of resolution? Like 12x14(ish)? I suppose that's better than complete darkness, but...
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Yep, that’s how these things typically work
- ISL 6y ago
  One can learn a lot from the time-series measured by a single sensor, let alone a 12x14 grid. In the bottom plot here, https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~neal/uwp/index72.cgi https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~neal/uwp/index72.cgi , one can readily determine that it is very cloudy here in Seattle today, and that yesterday was cloudy in the morning and partly-cloudy/clear through the rest of the day. To test this out, assuming that you are sighted, try navigating an exterior-windowed room with your eyelids closed on a bright day, then try doing the same with a true blindfold. I suspect the former will be far preferable.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I probably could have been more clear. I'm not dismissing it at all. But, it sounds like pretty intrusive surgery, and likely very expensive. So, it has me curious how much better it might be in say, 5 years. I imagine it's a hard decision to participate as a patient in something like this.
    - ISL 6y ago
      For sure -- hopefully they're making the input and brain interfaces modular, opening the possibility of upgrades as things get better.
dmead 6y ago
my https proxy can't connect to this. use tls 1.3 please.
- TheNorthman 6y ago
  That's strange. The site is using a `TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384` cipher suite, which is only supported in TLS 1.3. Are you sure the problem isn't on your end?
devindotcom 6y ago
This is an interesting area of research but I'm skeptical of any world first claims. I remember a camera going to a visual area implant like... 15 years ago? And the guy got something like a hundred pixels. Not super practical but he could see things crossing his field of vision, locate certain shapes reliably etc. For a blind person that can be life changing for sure but it was a short term thing and a prototype. Love seeing new research in this space but the science is nowhere near ready. Neuralink type stuff and other bleeding edge tech gets us like 5% of the to making this kind of thing practical for everyday life. By all means make it rain on researchers doing this stuff but don't expect miracles. The human vision system is incredible and we barely know how it works let alone how to imitate its functions. Fund basic research!!
- dekhn 6y ago
  It's not the first example; I can find other things reported from this year to a decade back, but in those cases, they were wiring into the retina, rather than later in the visual system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis)
  - Falling3 6y ago
    The earlier versions of this technology that I can recall used an oral interface. So this is definitely a big step up from that.
    - dekhn 6y ago
      That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainport
- nkoren 6y ago
  I recall watching a film about an 8x8 matrix of electrodes being inserted in the gap between the two hemispheres, just above the occipital lobe, producing 64 pixels worth of vision. The recipient had what looked like a DIN socket in the side of his head. I saw this film in a psychology 101 class at a community college, so it couldn't have been top-secret bleeding-edge research or anything. The year was 1991. Every few years since then -- and seriously, it's happened at least 10 times now -- I've seen something similar announced as though it's a major breakthrough. I don't understand what's going on. Are each of these announcements -- and that 1991 film itself -- merely aspirational bullshit, which never really come off as planned? Or do they each represent distinct branches of research whose apparent similarity is merely a function of my layman's understanding?
dcreemer 6y ago
not the first at all, but still a good step forward -- see the commercially available Argus II -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis * though it might be the first to work for those with optic nerve damage, or with this pathway
mrfusion 6y ago
This seems very similar to neurallink. What are the differences? Would it be placed in a different part of the brain?
- wcoenen 6y ago
  From the picture of the 9mm by 9mm tile, it looks like it has about 30 electrodes, each something like 0.1 mm wide maybe? (The article says they are "hair-thin"). They are obviously large enough to be somewhat stiff and have a fixed position on the tile. Presumably they are implanted by pushing the tile onto the brain surface. According to the paper Neuralink published last year[1], Neuralink's system has 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads. The threads are flexible and 4 to 6 micrometer wide, and are inserted individually by a robot that avoids hitting blood vessels. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v3
  - henearkr 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. So, why didn't they just use a Neuralink instead? Now it feels like they unveiled the Amiga a few months after having unveiled some Alienware laptop. Edit: no, the real reason why the Neuralink could not be used here, and the answer to the previous comment asking for the difference between the devices, is simply that the Neuralink is, for now at least, purely a sensor, whereas the aim with this vision-restoring device is to stimulate the cortex (so that would require different currents, electrodes, battery life, etc), which the Neuralink cannot do (in its current version).
    - wcoenen 6y ago
      In the neuralink paper which I linked above, they say at the end of the "Discussion" section that the system is also designed for stimulation on every channel, but that they have indeed not yet demonstrated that capability. Basically the difference is that Neuralink is a general BMI with some interesting innovations that is still in the research phase, while the Gennaris system is a specific application that is about to enter human clinical trials.
User23 6y ago
It’s interesting watching the 1980s cyberpunk predictions come true, from prosthetic limbs to visual implants to wild inequality and corporate power.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  I wish we were as close to cyberpunk in the field of prostethics as we’re in the field of corporate dystopia.
  - walshemj 6y ago
    Yeh my nonfunctional right eye needs an upgrade
miki123211 6y ago
Many people who are blind since birth (including myself) are pretty skeptical of such technologies. There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. An adult brain just can't make sense of those impulses. Even if that wasn't true, re-learning how to do literally everything with sight would be extremely hard. With such low resolutions, it probably wouldn't even be worth it, considering how much modern tech makes our lifes easier. It's still a huge thing for blind newborns and those who could see in the past, though.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  This is a really interesting comment. How do you know what resolution is? I hope you don't mind me asking.
  - stallmanite 6y ago
    I’m not blind and don’t personally know any blind people but I can imagine that blind people have heard of television at this point and the more curious among them have familiarized themselves with the technical implementation. Therefore a blind person understanding what resolution means shouldn’t necessarily be surprising.
  - codezero 6y ago
    Another guess waiting for authoritative source: it could possibly be applied when talking about the quality of a braille pattern (assuming that's something one does) :) Also, it's a word with a definition in the dictionary and I'm sure plenty of blind people are curious about words :)
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light The article goes on to state that the trial used 10 of these. So I guess the quality would work equivalently to a 40x40 pixel resolution or something.
- devindotcom 6y ago
  Exactly, there is also the consideration of the type of blindness. Retinal blindness is very common due to injuries and conditions like diabetes, and a retinal implant connecting to an otherwise functional visual pathway is probably the easiest case to solve for. For persons such as yourself and those with cortical blindness due to strokes etc it is much, much harder. Hopefully improvements to accessibility and rethinking interfaces in general provides a path forward in some ways.
GordonS 6y ago
"Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light (phosphenes) which provides information for the individual to navigate indoor and outdoor environments, and recognise the presence of people and objects around them" The article is really light on details - I'd love to see an image of how the world looks to the owner of such a device.
FandangoRanger 6y ago
It seems many deaf activists hate it when another deaf person gets a cochlear implant. Will this engender the same response from blind activists?
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  I expect not, because I’m not aware of any “Blind culture” equivalent to “Deaf culture”. There’s no unique language for blind people, for example - they speak whatever their family speaks.
- gostsamo 6y ago
  No, definitely not. It'd be a contemplation of the guinea pig dilemma: should I be part of the first wave and get low-quality upgrade that is infinitely better than the current status but have my nerves chewed so badly that I might not be able to get the new generation of tech in five to ten years? or should I wait those years in a extremely unpleasant state but have a really high quality of life update later?
Causality1 6y ago
These articles always give me a sense of melancholy. It seems the better-than-natural ocular implants are coming, just not fast enough for any of us reading this to still be alive when they get here.
mlang23 6y ago
Not again. Every 5 years or so, a story like this makes the news. People will walk up to me, ask me if I have already heard about this ground breaking development, and if I am already registered to receive my upgrade! Resolution is as low as fuck, and risks attached to such an upgrade are pretty crazy. I wish the media would stop using these kind of stories for clickbait.
mumblerino 6y ago
I can’t help but wonder about how someone who’s never seen would react after such an implant, once it actually reaches the market.

136 points by letientai299 6y ago

Original source: https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/opening-eyes-to-a-frontier-in-vision-restoration https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/opening-eyes-to-a-front...

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Nice, it's sad to see blog spam of blog spam :-) Dang can you swap the link for this one? The current one is a repost of a techcrunch one which is a summary of this one.
dang 6y ago
Changed from https://mondestuff.com/til/doctors-are-preparing-to-implant-the-worlds-first-human-bionic-eye/ https://mondestuff.com/til/doctors-are-preparing-to-implant-.... Thanks!

heyflyguy 6y ago

I'm still waiting for my thermal/multispectral/variable zoom contact lens.

curiousgal 6y ago
And improved batteries And more efficient solar cells And enamel reconstruction ...
- craftinator 6y ago
  And affordable healthcare
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Europeans already solved that one back in the 40s and 50s.
rzzzt 6y ago
(muffled Six Million Dollar Man theme song playing in the distance)

ksach 6y ago

Haven't there been other implants before? I just know that they weren't that successful yet but people were at least able to see some patterns, if I remember correctly.

tyingq 6y ago

"Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light (phosphenes)" Does that mean a total of 172 "pixels" of resolution? Like 12x14(ish)? I suppose that's better than complete darkness, but...

s1artibartfast 6y ago
Yep, that’s how these things typically work
ISL 6y ago
One can learn a lot from the time-series measured by a single sensor, let alone a 12x14 grid. In the bottom plot here, https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~neal/uwp/index72.cgi https://www.atmos.washington.edu/~neal/uwp/index72.cgi , one can readily determine that it is very cloudy here in Seattle today, and that yesterday was cloudy in the morning and partly-cloudy/clear through the rest of the day. To test this out, assuming that you are sighted, try navigating an exterior-windowed room with your eyelids closed on a bright day, then try doing the same with a true blindfold. I suspect the former will be far preferable.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I probably could have been more clear. I'm not dismissing it at all. But, it sounds like pretty intrusive surgery, and likely very expensive. So, it has me curious how much better it might be in say, 5 years. I imagine it's a hard decision to participate as a patient in something like this.
  - ISL 6y ago
    For sure -- hopefully they're making the input and brain interfaces modular, opening the possibility of upgrades as things get better.

dmead 6y ago

my https proxy can't connect to this. use tls 1.3 please.

TheNorthman 6y ago
That's strange. The site is using a `TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384` cipher suite, which is only supported in TLS 1.3. Are you sure the problem isn't on your end?

devindotcom 6y ago

This is an interesting area of research but I'm skeptical of any world first claims. I remember a camera going to a visual area implant like... 15 years ago? And the guy got something like a hundred pixels. Not super practical but he could see things crossing his field of vision, locate certain shapes reliably etc. For a blind person that can be life changing for sure but it was a short term thing and a prototype. Love seeing new research in this space but the science is nowhere near ready. Neuralink type stuff and other bleeding edge tech gets us like 5% of the to making this kind of thing practical for everyday life. By all means make it rain on researchers doing this stuff but don't expect miracles. The human vision system is incredible and we barely know how it works let alone how to imitate its functions. Fund basic research!!

dekhn 6y ago
It's not the first example; I can find other things reported from this year to a decade back, but in those cases, they were wiring into the retina, rather than later in the visual system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis)
- Falling3 6y ago
  The earlier versions of this technology that I can recall used an oral interface. So this is definitely a big step up from that.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainport
nkoren 6y ago
I recall watching a film about an 8x8 matrix of electrodes being inserted in the gap between the two hemispheres, just above the occipital lobe, producing 64 pixels worth of vision. The recipient had what looked like a DIN socket in the side of his head. I saw this film in a psychology 101 class at a community college, so it couldn't have been top-secret bleeding-edge research or anything. The year was 1991. Every few years since then -- and seriously, it's happened at least 10 times now -- I've seen something similar announced as though it's a major breakthrough. I don't understand what's going on. Are each of these announcements -- and that 1991 film itself -- merely aspirational bullshit, which never really come off as planned? Or do they each represent distinct branches of research whose apparent similarity is merely a function of my layman's understanding?

dcreemer 6y ago

not the first at all, but still a good step forward -- see the commercially available Argus II -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_retinal_prosthesis * though it might be the first to work for those with optic nerve damage, or with this pathway

mrfusion 6y ago

This seems very similar to neurallink. What are the differences? Would it be placed in a different part of the brain?

wcoenen 6y ago
From the picture of the 9mm by 9mm tile, it looks like it has about 30 electrodes, each something like 0.1 mm wide maybe? (The article says they are "hair-thin"). They are obviously large enough to be somewhat stiff and have a fixed position on the tile. Presumably they are implanted by pushing the tile onto the brain surface. According to the paper Neuralink published last year[1], Neuralink's system has 3,072 electrodes per array distributed across 96 threads. The threads are flexible and 4 to 6 micrometer wide, and are inserted individually by a robot that avoids hitting blood vessels. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v3
- henearkr 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. So, why didn't they just use a Neuralink instead? Now it feels like they unveiled the Amiga a few months after having unveiled some Alienware laptop. Edit: no, the real reason why the Neuralink could not be used here, and the answer to the previous comment asking for the difference between the devices, is simply that the Neuralink is, for now at least, purely a sensor, whereas the aim with this vision-restoring device is to stimulate the cortex (so that would require different currents, electrodes, battery life, etc), which the Neuralink cannot do (in its current version).
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    In the neuralink paper which I linked above, they say at the end of the "Discussion" section that the system is also designed for stimulation on every channel, but that they have indeed not yet demonstrated that capability. Basically the difference is that Neuralink is a general BMI with some interesting innovations that is still in the research phase, while the Gennaris system is a specific application that is about to enter human clinical trials.

User23 6y ago

It’s interesting watching the 1980s cyberpunk predictions come true, from prosthetic limbs to visual implants to wild inequality and corporate power.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
I wish we were as close to cyberpunk in the field of prostethics as we’re in the field of corporate dystopia.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Yeh my nonfunctional right eye needs an upgrade

miki123211 6y ago

Many people who are blind since birth (including myself) are pretty skeptical of such technologies. There's some research claiming that sight is almost useless if you get it past the age of five. An adult brain just can't make sense of those impulses. Even if that wasn't true, re-learning how to do literally everything with sight would be extremely hard. With such low resolutions, it probably wouldn't even be worth it, considering how much modern tech makes our lifes easier. It's still a huge thing for blind newborns and those who could see in the past, though.

lordnacho 6y ago
This is a really interesting comment. How do you know what resolution is? I hope you don't mind me asking.
- stallmanite 6y ago
  I’m not blind and don’t personally know any blind people but I can imagine that blind people have heard of television at this point and the more curious among them have familiarized themselves with the technical implementation. Therefore a blind person understanding what resolution means shouldn’t necessarily be surprising.
- codezero 6y ago
  Another guess waiting for authoritative source: it could possibly be applied when talking about the quality of a braille pattern (assuming that's something one does) :) Also, it's a word with a definition in the dictionary and I'm sure plenty of blind people are curious about words :)
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light The article goes on to state that the trial used 10 of these. So I guess the quality would work equivalently to a 40x40 pixel resolution or something.
devindotcom 6y ago
Exactly, there is also the consideration of the type of blindness. Retinal blindness is very common due to injuries and conditions like diabetes, and a retinal implant connecting to an otherwise functional visual pathway is probably the easiest case to solve for. For persons such as yourself and those with cortical blindness due to strokes etc it is much, much harder. Hopefully improvements to accessibility and rethinking interfaces in general provides a path forward in some ways.

GordonS 6y ago

"Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light (phosphenes) which provides information for the individual to navigate indoor and outdoor environments, and recognise the presence of people and objects around them" The article is really light on details - I'd love to see an image of how the world looks to the owner of such a device.

FandangoRanger 6y ago

It seems many deaf activists hate it when another deaf person gets a cochlear implant. Will this engender the same response from blind activists?

lazyasciiart 6y ago
I expect not, because I’m not aware of any “Blind culture” equivalent to “Deaf culture”. There’s no unique language for blind people, for example - they speak whatever their family speaks.
gostsamo 6y ago
No, definitely not. It'd be a contemplation of the guinea pig dilemma: should I be part of the first wave and get low-quality upgrade that is infinitely better than the current status but have my nerves chewed so badly that I might not be able to get the new generation of tech in five to ten years? or should I wait those years in a extremely unpleasant state but have a really high quality of life update later?

Causality1 6y ago

These articles always give me a sense of melancholy. It seems the better-than-natural ocular implants are coming, just not fast enough for any of us reading this to still be alive when they get here.

mlang23 6y ago

Not again. Every 5 years or so, a story like this makes the news. People will walk up to me, ask me if I have already heard about this ground breaking development, and if I am already registered to receive my upgrade! Resolution is as low as fuck, and risks attached to such an upgrade are pretty crazy. I wish the media would stop using these kind of stories for clickbait.

mumblerino 6y ago

I can’t help but wonder about how someone who’s never seen would react after such an implant, once it actually reaches the market.