New-age prosthetic technique enables blind mice to see

Their prosthetic device can potentially be used to treat blindness in humans though their work thus far has been on mice.

This video is not supported by your browser at this time.

Setting out to decode brain activity, they unraveled patterns of electrical pulses and deciphered what an animal may be seeing. She told the TEDMED audience that when tested in mice this prosthetic eye can deliver more accurate images than can other prosthetics. “Current prosthetics do not work very well,” she said. Sight-impaired people who try them succeed in seeing bright lights and edges, but she said there is opportunity to create prosthetics that are more effective than that.

Patterns of pulses coming out of the eye tell the brain what is seen. With the blind person, the brain no longer gets the necessary visual information from the eye. Her prosthetic, with its encoder and transducer, can send out signals that the brain can understand.

Enlarge

Fundamentally, Nirenberg is stirring up interest in the very idea that her image encoder transducer can bypass a damaged retina to send these codes to the brain. Her system mimics the complex behavior of the frontline photoreceptor cells, creating a more natural artificial message for the ganglion cells to interpret. It’s seen as a way to jump over damaged circuitry.

Nirenberg is herself eager to talk about the possibilities this may bring to medical science. Finding ways to communicate with the brain and its language can be applied to treat deafness and motor disorders. ”Understanding the code—the language of the brain--is really important,” she told the audience. “If we can understand the language of the brain, then things become possible that were not possible before.”

Of course much of the interest in seeing her team progress in restoring the vision of mice is tied to knowing what are the prospects for doing similar feats with humans. When asked if she thought that stage was ten years away, she said, no, “I am hoping less.”

© 2011 Medical Xpress