Bionic eye

The bionic eye

 Imagine how you would feel if you slowly lost your sight, and you knew there was nothing you could do about it.  This is the reality for thousands of people who suffer from degenerative eye diseases such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.  Retinitis pigmentosa is the leading cause of blindness in young people.  The degenerative condition affects approximately two million people worldwide and strikes early in life, often when a person is in their 30s.  There are few ways to predict its onset, progression or severity, and it can lead to total blindness within a decade.  To counter these dire conditions UNSW biomedical researchers Scientia Professor Nigel Lovell and Professor Greg Swanning had an incredible vision in 1997: creating a bionic eye.

 By 2009, Lovell and Suaning's research had progressed to the point that it was instrumental in the establishment of Bionic Vision Australia (BVA), a consortium with a special research initiative from the Australian Research Council.  An incredible $42m in funding was secured.  BVA grew rapidly.  By 2012, the research team had implanted its first partially implanted prototype in three patients with retinitis pigmentosa.  A 24-electrode array with external electronics allowed users to see spots of light, called phosphenes, and with special cameras and algorithms, they were able to get a sense of distance.  "We were very excited by the first trial because it proved that the technology and the implementation technique worked," Swanning says.  Encouraged by these results, he joined forces with a team of elite surgical experts and began pre-clinical work that culminated in the successful demonstration of the fully implantable UNSW Phoenix99 bionic eye system in 2015.  happened  This new device represents many of the world's most advanced neural stimulation technologies and should allow vision that is many times better than previously achieved.  Lovell hopes to implant a dozen patients with the device in the next two years.

 How does the bionic eye work?

 A bionic vision system consists of a camera, attached to a pair of glasses, that transmits high-frequency radio signals to a microchip implanted in the retina.  Electrodes on the implanted chip convert these signals into electrical impulses to stimulate cells in the retina that connect to the optic nerve.  These impulses then travel along the optic nerve to the brain's vision processing centers, where they are interpreted as images.

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