Curing blindness remains a major challenge in medicine. Degenerative diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration are characterized by dysfunctional photoreceptors, which leads to the impairment of light detection in the retina. For patients with blindness caused by such diseases, one approach to restoring vision is a retinal prosthetic implant.
These bionic retinal implants provide electrical stimulation that elicits neuronal activity from the retina, perceived by the brain as visual objects called phosphenes. However, patients with such implants only see blurry images in shades of grey that cover a small part of the visual field.
A team of scientists from Germany has now proposed a modelling framework to better understand the effects of retinal stimulation. They hope that their work will enable improved bionic vision for future recipients of retinal prostheses, by making bionic retinal implants work faster and produce sharper, coloured images — essentially restoring natural sight.
Find out more in this video abstract by Daniel Rathbun and Eberhart Zrenner, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Video courtesy of D L Rathbun et al Spike-triggered average electrical stimuli as input filters for bionic vision—a perspective J. Neural Eng. 10.1088/1741-2552/aae493
