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Bionic Eyes Hope For The Blind
Bionic Eyes Hope For The Blind
Bionic Eyes Hope For The Blind
Introduction:
There is no lovelier way to thank God for your sight Than by giving a helping hand To those in dark. There is no replacement for human sight. It is simply incomparable because of its capacity to see. Our life is full of pictures we daily see. Life without sight is dark. And blind people lead dark lives. As capable human beings, we need to do something more than just helping a blind person cross the road. Belonging to the community of engineers there is no frontier that we cannot conquer. If scientists give birth to ideas, then it is we engineers who put life into those ideas. Today, we have every tool in our hand. The ball is in our court! It is our turn now, to return what mankind has given us. What about bestowing sight for the blind? There is no magic wand to do this in a jiffy. But yes! We certainly know the magic route to reach our goal: Science and Technology. Today, we talk of artificial intelligence that has created waves of interest in the field of robotics. When this has been possible, why not artificial vision? It is with this dream that I present this paper on Bionic Eyes. Sooner or later, this shall create a revolution in the field of medicine.
It is important to know few facts about the organ of sight i.e, the Eye before we proceed towards the technicalities involved.
Corneal Transplants:
Surgical removal of opaque or deteriorating corneas and replacement with donor transplants is a common medical practice. Corneal tissue is avascular; that is, the cornea is free of blood vessels. Therefore corneal tissue is seldom rejected by the bodys immune system. Antibodies carried in the blood have no way to reach the transplanted tissue, and therefore long-term success following implant surgery is excellent.
A Belgian device has a coil that wraps around the optic nerve, with only four points of electrical contact. By shifting the phase and varying the strength of the signals, the coil can stimulate different parts of the optic nerve, rather like the way the electron guns in TVs are aimed at different parts of the screen. The video signals come from an external camera and are transmitted to the implant via a radio antenna and microchip beneath the skin just behind the ear. Implants of a microchip, smaller than the head of a pin and about half the thickness of a sheet of paper were used to remove blindness.
The surgery!
This concept of Artificial Vision is also interesting to engineers, because there are a number of technicalities involved in this surgery apart from the anatomical part. The microsurgery starts with three incisions smaller than the diameter of a needle in the white part of the eye. Through the incisions, surgeons introduce a vacuuming device that removes the gel in the middle of the eye and replaces it with saline solution. Surgeons then make a pinpoint opening in the retina to inject fluid in order to lift a portion of the retina from the back of the eye,
creating a pocket to accommodate the chip. The retina is resealed over the chip, and doctors inject air into the middle of the eye to force the retina back over the device and close the incisions. During the entire surgery, a biomedical engineer takes part actively to ensure that there is no problem with the chip to be implanted.
The Analogy:
There is a great degree of coherence between the way our eyes function to that of a camera. Perhaps our eyes had been the inspiration behind the cameras invention. Heres more about it: From the structural point of view the eye may be compared with a camera. The eyelids act as a shutter and there is an entrance window for light the cornea; a diaphragm to regulate the aperture and therefore the amount of light entering the iris; a lens to focus the image; a darkened interior formed by the choroid, and a light sensitive plate which receives the image the retina.
Brain Implants:
There is one more concept similar to Bionic Eyes that is also making waves in the medical field and that is the use of Brain Implants to remove blindness. In recent years, progress is being made towards sensory substitution devices for the blind. In the long run, there could be the possibility of brain implants. A brain implant or cortical implant provides visual input from a camera directly to the brain via electrodes in contact with the visual cortex at the backside of the head. If we try to do a fair and objective comparison between auditory display technology and brain implant technology it should first be stressed that result of any comparisons can of course change over time as the respective technologies are further developed and refined.
The Challenges:
There are many very many obstacles to be overcome before Bionic Eyes become a success story.
Our eyes are perhaps the most sensitive of all organs in the human body. A nano-sized irritant can create havoc in the eye. There are 120 million rods and 6 million cones in the retina of every
healthy human eye. Creating an artificial replacement for these is no easy task. Si based photo detectors have been tried in earlier attempts. But Si
is toxic to the human body and reacts unfavorably with fluids in the eye. There are many doubts as to how the brain will react to foreign signals
generated by artificial light sensors. Infection and negative reaction are the always-feared factors. It is
Conclusion:
Restoration of sight for the blind is no more a dream today. Bionic Eyes have made this true. Though there are a number of challenges to be faced before this technology reaches the common man, the path has been laid. This paper has tried to present the concept of Artificial Vision through a engineers viewpoint. Engineers play a major role in the design stage of Bionic Eyes. It is just a matter of 4-5 years, that the blind will be able to see through these Bionic Eyes; thanks to Science and Technology.
References:
1. Neural Implants First Bionic Eyes by Victor Chase. 2. Hitting the Nerve (from the New Scientist). 3. Doctors Test Chips in Eyeballs to Restore Sight from azcentral.com 4. www.dobelle.com 5. Anthonys textbook of Anatomy and Physiology - Gary A Thibodeau, Kevin T Patton 6. Science Reporter (December 2004)