Neurosurgeon creates Geordi's VISOR

Dominus Atheos · Post by **Dominus Atheos** » 2006-04-06 12:02am

Link

Check the pictures below, it really does function just like the VISOR.

New device allows woman to see, even without eyes
Updated: 3/31/2006 5:55:00 AM
By: Ivanhoe Newswire

(ST. LOUIS) - More than a million people in the United States are legally blind. Many of them once had vision but tragically lost it. Now a breakthrough device could give them back some of their sight.

Some call her the bionic woman. Others call her a medical miracle. But Cheri Robertson has given herself another title:

"I just call myself the robo-chick."

Robertson is blind, but this device allows her to see, not with her eyes but with her brain! Fifteen years ago, she lost both of her eyes in a car accident. She was just 19 years old.

"When I realized yes, I am going to be blind, I thought, I guess I'm going to learn to do things a little differently now," Robertson says. And she did. She traveled to Portugal to become the 16th person in the world to have special electrodes implanted in her brain. With the help of a device, she could see again!

"I said, ‘Oh my God, I can see it. I can see it,' and I was just so excited!"

Neurosurgeon Kenneth Smith, M.D., of Saint Louis University School of Medicine, said the procedure is the first to reverse blindness in patients without eyes. "They are really seeing. The brain is getting impulses just like when you and I see."

A camera on the tip of Robertson's glasses sends signals to a computer that's strapped around her waist. The computer then stimulates electrodes in the brain through a cord that attaches to the head. Patients see flashes of light and outlines of objects.

"Whatever I see is just two splashes of light, so I know something is there," Robertson says. She admits support from her mom and the local Lion's Club keeps her spirits high. "If I was all depressed, I couldn't affect anybody's life for the good, and I want to make a difference." Friends, family and doctors say she already has.

The surgery is not yet performed in the United States, but Dr. Smith said he hopes it will be in the next five years. The main safety concern is an infection where the port goes into the head. For the surgery to work, patients must have once had vision.

Jadeite · Post by **Jadeite** » 2006-04-06 12:33am

Pretty cool. One of the things that really terrifies me is what it'd be like to go blind, so this gives nice hope of that not being so bad if it happened.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2006-04-06 12:49am

It definitely needs a cooler housing.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2006-04-06 06:19am

It's probably better than total blindness, but it's far from perfect. Nonetheless, I'd like to see more advances on this front.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-04-06 08:21am

I think there were some even better results (black and white images that were pretty much as good as the real thing IIRC), however they require a diffrent (lesser) kind of damage then this woman suffered, obviusly. Since I read about it a couple of years back I can't remember the details. Pretty cool anyway.

And also agree that the housing should be improved...

Winston Blake · Post by **Winston Blake** » 2006-04-06 08:37am

Indeed. The housing needs to be all chrome with a red LED in the centre.

...What?

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2006-04-06 09:55am

...It's a start.
Not a bad one, either, but it's far from the best we can do.

Korvan · Post by **Korvan** » 2006-04-06 02:21pm

It seems to be just a matter of connecting up more and more neurons to the electrodes to increase resolution. Once millions are connected though, calibrating it would be a bitch. You'd need one hell of a test pattern and a whole lot of time.

TheBlackCat · Post by **TheBlackCat** » 2006-04-06 05:21pm

Korvan wrote:It seems to be just a matter of connecting up more and more neurons to the electrodes to increase resolution. Once millions are connected though, calibrating it would be a bitch. You'd need one hell of a test pattern and a whole lot of time.

It isn't that simple. The neurons in the primary visual cortex do not simply code for spots of light. They code for bars, angles, borders, and other such things. What is more, they don't just code for a region of light, they code for a region of light surrounded by a region of darkness (or vice versus, or a region of light next to a region of darkness). So they would fire when exposed to a change in contrast but not fire in response to constant illumination. There are completely different classes that code for changes in color, and yet more that fire when the two eyes are seeing the same thing but not when they aren't. There are also different classes of neurons that code for different temporal and spatial frequencies. The image is also highly distorted. Simply mapping the image onto the brain won't work except at these large scales, the individual receptive fields of the neurons are too complicated.

There is also the issue with how long it will last. The brain does not like have electrodes embedded in it, it tends to coat them with ECM then force them out. The wire connecting the electrodes to skull also flex as the brain moves around in the skull, ultimately fatiguing and then breaking the wire. The loose end of the wire then stabs into the brain as it moves around.

Trytostaydead · Post by **Trytostaydead** » 2006-04-06 05:49pm

As Blackcat pointed out, the visual system is incredibly complex with so much cross talking (not to mention the crossing that occurs at the chiasm, then into the brain itself), it makes a grown man want to cry.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2006-04-06 08:20pm

mmar wrote:I think there were some even better results (black and white images that were pretty much as good as the real thing IIRC), however they require a diffrent (lesser) kind of damage then this woman suffered, obviusly.

Those other systems might have linked to the retina rather than directly to the brain.

I'm glad she had a good result - but what of everyone else who has had this done? Have they had equal success, or not?

BloodAngel · Post by **BloodAngel** » 2006-04-06 11:21pm

This is relatively new technology, so I don't expect much right now. However, later on, I'm confident that it's definitely going to become MUCH better. Us going this far is already a medical breakthrough.

LeftWingExtremist · Post by **LeftWingExtremist** » 2006-04-07 01:40am

And also agree that the housing should be improved...

how about this

every trekkies dream.

Sharpshooter · Post by **Sharpshooter** » 2006-04-07 02:00am

Bah - it needs to be squarish with 7-9 red LED panals that light up in a sweeping motion and a tiny speaker that makes a whooshing noise on command.

But in all seriousness, this is great - 20, 30 years from now, at the rate technology is advancing, we might be able to get full prosthetic eyes that hook into the system and give comparably normal detail and acuity. Hell, we might even find a cloning workaround or something.

defanatic · Post by **defanatic** » 2006-04-07 04:22am

Or possibly even better eyes, in terms of resolution and zoom capability. What's that really far away? Ooh, a newspaper. God damnit. BHP has falled three cents.

LeftWingExtremist · Post by **LeftWingExtremist** » 2006-04-07 09:01am

Also an extra pair of eyes couldn't hurt as well (it sounds possible).

Post by **Colonel Olrik** » 2006-04-07 10:50am

He says, right now, governmental restrictions may get in the way of performing the surgery in the United States. "There were no governmental or hospital problems with getting permission to do the experimental operation in Portugal, whereas, it would be almost impossible here. Plus, it was much cheaper -- about one-third of the cost in the hospital as it would be in U.S. hospitals," he says.

eheh.

TheBlackCat · Post by **TheBlackCat** » 2006-04-07 01:49pm

LeftWingExtremist wrote:Also an extra pair of eyes couldn't hurt as well (it sounds possible).

You can't add additional eyes without reducing the resolution and/or visual range of the your existing eyes. All the visual processing power available is already being used, so increasing the field of view will involve taking away processing power from your existing eyes.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2006-04-07 02:05pm

LeftWingExtremist wrote:Also an extra pair of eyes couldn't hurt as well (it sounds possible).

No. An extra pair of eyes would only be useful if you had computer hardware stitching and fusing the input from both sets of eyes into a pair of images that your brain, being the product of several hundred million years of evolution favoring two eyes, can comprehend. That, or this computer hardware switches off between pairs of eyes. While we can actually perform such stitching and fusing operations in real-time (by real-time, I mean the frame-time of the camera, which would range between 15 to 60 Hz for the types of camera you'd mount on something a person could wear comfortably,) the hardware required to do this is fairly expensive, in terms of manufacturing cost, size and weight considerations, and in terms of power considerations (DSPs are very power-hungry.)

While that will change in coming decades, for now such a thing is vaporware, and we ought to lick the problem of restoring baseline visual fucntionality before we start worrying about adding capability.

LeftWingExtremist · Post by **LeftWingExtremist** » 2006-04-07 07:49pm

You can't add additional eyes without reducing the resolution and/or visual range of the your existing eyes. All the visual processing power available is already being used, so increasing the field of view will involve taking away processing power from your existing eyes.

oh

. my dreams have just been trampled. oh well.

WacoKid · Post by **WacoKid** » 2006-04-07 09:58pm

Is there really conceptually a way to improve this concept much. The visual system is so damn complicated, I find it hard to believe that we could figure out how to reproduce the exact signals sent to the brain and their correct interpretation.

Also, from someone who knows more, would it theoretically be possible eventually to do something like this for someone who has never had sight?

I'm majoring in neuroscience, so I'm very interested. Would nanotechnology, for example, help with this sort of thing (I mean nanorobots, at the risk of sounding stupid)?

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-04-07 10:02pm

I don't know any more than you but I know you can't give them sight if they've never had it or they'll commit suicide.

Brian

WacoKid · Post by **WacoKid** » 2006-04-08 12:04am

That's actually a very good point that I hadn't thought of at all. I'd be curious for you to explain it further though.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2006-04-08 05:48am

brianeyci wrote:I don't know any more than you but I know you can't give them sight if they've never had it or they'll commit suicide.

A little simplistic - it usually doesn't get that bad.

Part of it is that if someone is blind from birth or infancy the brain doesn't simply let that section sit there by itself - those cells start to take on other functions. If you don't experience and "learn" to see early in life you miss a criticial developmental window. If later on in life you become able to see the brain, never having learned to handle the input, never learns to properly process the information. The result is even if a person see they are functionally blind because they can't make useful sense out of what they see.

Oliver Sachs wrote an essay "To See and Not See" about one such case (the man lost his sight in early childhood), which was later made into a full length movie. The man in question did not commit suicide, but he was never able to get much use of his restored vision, either. He briefly mentions other instances where someone blind from early life was given sight and that yes, there are problems, including an occassional suicide or self-blinding but it's not 100% certain thing.

I thinik nowadays people performing sight-restoring surgery are far more aware that it's not just the eyes that need rehab, and there are more realisitc expectations about just what giving sight to some of these people will do or not do for them. Of course, the general public is not aware of these issues.

So if someone was born blind, or went blind early, you'd having to perform sight-restoring surgery on them pretty quickly so you wouldn't miss that developmental window. Even people who lost their vision in, say, their early 20's and then regained it 20 or 30 years later (usually due to various medical advances) have a very hard time readjusting to using vision however much they want and are happy to have their vision again. The brain has to relearn things like perspective and how to make three dimensional sense out of the images relayed by the eyes.

Then there are people who's problem is not their eyes but their brain - if the part of the brain that processes visual input isn't working this techonology won't work, either. Rather like cochlear implants won't help everyone who's deaf, either.

All that said, I think the goals are worthy and I'd certainly like to see the technology advance. There are certainly tens of thousands of people, if not more, for whom a mature form of this technology would be a godsend.

WacoKid · Post by **WacoKid** » 2006-04-08 07:09am

I love Oliver Sacks...

Ah, so this is the same principle, for example, because of which if you remove some of a rats whiskers very early on, during its sensitive period (shortly after birth), the "barrels" in the brain that correspond to the removed whiskers will simply not develop?