Release date: 2017-03-15
A team of engineers at UC San Diego and the University of La Jolla startup Nanovision Biosciences have developed a new nanotechnology for retinal prostheses to study the ability to restore retinal neurons in response to light.
They detailed their work in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroengineering. This technology can help tens of millions of people with neurodegenerative diseases worldwide, including macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa and diabetes caused by vision loss.
The new prosthesis relies on two groundbreaking technologies. One consists of an array of silicon nanowires that simultaneously sense light and electrically stimulate the retina accordingly. Nanowires give prostheses a higher resolution than other devices - closer to the dense spacing of photoreceptors in the human retina. Another breakthrough is the ability to transmit power and data to the nanowire wireless devices at the same recording speed and energy efficiency over the same wireless link.
One of the main differences between the investigator's prototype and the existing retinal prosthesis is that the new system does not require a visual sensor external to the eye to capture the visual scene and then transform it into alternating signals to sequentially stimulate the retinal neurons. Instead, silicon nanowires mimic the light-sensing cones and rods of the retina to directly stimulate retinal cells. The nanowires are bundled into an electrode grid that is directly activated by light and powered by a single radio signal. This mode of converting incident light directly and locally into electrical stimulation allows the prosthesis to have a simpler and more scalable architecture.
Gert Cauwenberghs, professor of bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and Gert Cauwenberghs, senior author of the paper, said: "To restore functional vision, the neural interface is critical to the resolution and sensitivity of the human retina."
Source: Noble
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