Laser-powered bionic eye gives vision to the blind

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

The article mentions that they've barely scratched the surface (as it were) of understanding how the optic nerve works in a large way (part of that is color encoding).

I would assume they've gotten this far on a little guesswork and labwork testing how the optic nerve receives and transmits impulses to the brain in a very simple way. So far, it looks like they've figured out how it encodes light/dark shapes (thus grayscale), how the optic nerve encodes the input it receives from the retina as color and how the brain receives that encoding to process it is still a mystery.

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.

zing!

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

I believe that almost the same thing happened at an airport.

This may have been a joke and people are responding coldly, but that is something we're going to have to see. As biomods become more frequent and start helping more people, there are going to be biases and hatred to those that look different because of them; and I imagine there will be different kinds of austricizing based on early tech (bulkier systems) and later tech (normal looking eye, except for a couple weird parts that look like tattoos, but are circuitry, for example).

But despite all that, I am sure people will be very. very happy to see again; or in the future, perhaps for the first time.

I wonder when babies will be the subject of these implants, so that babies born blind can still learn how to see properly. This is very exciting!

> 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.)

This isn't entirely related, but it's an interesting story, so I think I'll share, anyway.

From my personal experience, even restoration of previous eyesight can be pretty unnerving for a bit.

I spent much of last year losing my vision as a cataract in my only eye got progressively worse. I put off surgery as long as possible due to a high risk of complications that could lead to total blindness. By the time I was ready to have the surgery, I couldn't see to do a lot of everyday things, like cook, watch TV, etc. and had a lot of colorblindness and diplopia (sometimes seeing as many as 8 'ghost' images when looking at an object).

The sudden improvement in my vision after cataract surgery took probably two weeks to fully adjust to, mentally. I actually had a bit of paranoia for a while, because I would see things in my vision that I wasn't used to seeing and it would trigger some sort of panic response. I hadn't been totally blind prior to the operation, but suddenly there was all of this detail that hadn't been there before (or that I hadn't seen in months, anyway).

I'd look at something and it was blue or had texture or cast a shadow. It made it very hard to concentrate. Everything was a distraction.

I remember that I had a mild panic attack one day shortly after surgery when we stopped for lunch. We were seated next to a window in the restaurant and it was very windy and cloudy outside. The wind blowing the clouds around was causing shifts in lighting coming in through the window and it was just too much sensory input for me to handle.

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..!)

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.

They've always been faster, and in fact the FDA has been catching up a bit in this regards. Waiting another few years for a cure for blindness isn't too bad. Propranolol, the first major beta-blocker, was approved in Europe in 1965 but the FDA didn't approve its use for hypertension (the most important one) until 1978. That's probably a few 10,000s of deaths right there. Though that has to be weighed against the fact that they probably saved 100s of lives by delaying their approval of practolol, a similar drug with bad side effects, so its not like the FDA's increased vigilance over Europe doesn't provide any benefit.