Abstract
Retinal prostheses hold the promise of restoring vision in totally blind people. However, a decade of clinical trials highlighted quantitative limitations hampering the possibility of reaching this goal. A key challenge in retinal stimulation is to independently activate retinal neurons over a large portion of the subject’s visual field. Reaching such a goal would significantly improve the perception accuracy in retinal implants’ users, along with their spatial cognition, attention, ambient mapping and interaction with the environment. Here we show a wide-field, high-density and high-resolution photovoltaic epiretinal prosthesis for artificial vision (POLYRETINA). The prosthesis embeds 10,498 physically and functionally independent photovoltaic pixels, allowing for wide retinal coverage and high-resolution stimulation. Single-pixel illumination reproducibly induced network-mediated responses from retinal ganglion cells at safe irradiance levels. Furthermore, POLYRETINA allowed response discrimination with a high spatial resolution equivalent to the pixel pitch (120 µm) thanks to the network-mediated stimulation mechanism. This approach could allow mid-peripheral artificial vision in patients with retinitis pigmentosa.
Highlights
Retinal prostheses hold the promise of restoring vision in totally blind people
Retinal implants have been predominantly tested in blind patients affected by retinitis pigmentosa, a set of inherited retinal dystrophies causing the progressive loss of retinal photoreceptors, the visual field’s constriction and eventually blindness[14]
Our results demonstrated that POLYRETINA could achieve a high spatial resolution in epiretinal stimulation, which is a substantial step forward for artificial vision
Summary
Retinal prostheses hold the promise of restoring vision in totally blind people. a decade of clinical trials highlighted quantitative limitations hampering the possibility of reaching this goal. POLYRETINA allowed response discrimination with a high spatial resolution equivalent to the pixel pitch (120 μm) thanks to the network-mediated stimulation mechanism This approach could allow mid-peripheral artificial vision in patients with retinitis pigmentosa. Onethird of the users of the Argus® II epiretinal prosthesis (the most implanted so far) declared that the device had a neutral impact on their quality of life after three years[19]. This discouragement can be attributed to quantitative limitations in artificial vision provided by retinal implants[18]. The coarse visual resolution offered by the device
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