“Bionic Eye” May Help the Blind to See 

A new artificial retina, an array of electrodes implanted on the back of the eye, has been found to restore partial vision to totally blind people. The prosthesis transmits visual information captured by a video camera.

In a study focused on 15 blind participants who had the implant for at least three months, 10 of the patients subsequently tested were able to identify the direction of moving objects. The research was presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

More than two million Americans suffer from eye diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration, slowly losing their vision as the nerve cells that detect light are destroyed, due to either age or illness. There is no known cure.

“These results give new hope to the many people with degenerative retinal diseases,” said Jessy Dorn, Ph.D., of Second Sight Medical Products, lead author of the study.

In this case, the researchers worked around the destroyed cells. Each participant was given a pair of glasses with a small video camera mounted on it, and a belt with a tiny computer attached. The computer processed video images from the camera and transmitted the data to the implanted electrodes on the retina. When the users “looked” at a monitor with a white bar sweeping across a black screen, the electrodes that corresponded with the moving bar stimulated cells in the eye, creating spots of light in their fields of vision.

“We found that most of the study participants were better able to determine the direction of the bar when using the prosthesis system than without it, or with a scrambled video input,” Dorn said. “In other words, this new system gave most blind people the ability to identify an object’s direction of motion — something they could not do without it.”

An international clinical trial is now testing the prosthesis system. To date, 32 blind people have received the implant. The research was supported by the National Eye Institute.