BIONIC EYE

MADE BY IQBAL

BIONIC EYE ?

Bio-electronic eye Electronic device which replaces functionality of a part or whole of the eye Adding functionality to the eye

BLINDNESS-INABILITY TO SEE

Rods and cones, millions of them are the back of every healthy human eye. They are biological solar cells in the retina which converts light to electrical impulses. Without them, eyes loss the capacity to see, and are declared blind. Degenerative retinal diseases result in death of photoreceptors.

Diseases of the Eye

Retinitis Pigmentosa Macular Degeneration

Retinitis Pigmentosa

Hereditary Genetic Disease Peripheral Rods degenerate Gradually progresses towards center of eye Spares the foveal region Tunnel vision results

Macular Degeration

Genetically Related Cones in Macula region degenrate Loss or damage of central vision Peripheral Retina spared Common among old people

Bionic Eye: Two Approaches

MARC Multiple Unit Artificial Retina Chipset

The images are captured by an external camera Processed and then transmitted to an implant on the retina. This in-turn will transmit it to the ganglion cells and then to the optic nerve

Multiple Unit Artificial Retina Chipset

It uses a CCD camera input and a RF. A resolution of 100 pixels is achieved by a 10* 10 array. It consists of a platinum on rubber silicone electrode array.

Multiple Unit Artificial Retina Chipset (MARC)

PARTS

A digital camera that's built into a pair of glasses. It captures images in real time and sends images to a microchip. A video-processing microchip that's built into a handheld unit. It processes images into electrical pulses representing patterns of light and dark and sends the pulses to a radio transmitter in the glasses. A radio transmitter that wirelessly transmits pulses to a receiver implanted above the ear or under the eye A radio receiver that sends pulses to the retinal implant by a hairthin implanted wire A retinal implant with an array of 60 electrodes on a chip measuring 1 mm by 1 mm

WORKING

The entire system runs on a battery pack that's housed with the video processing unit. When the camera captures an image -- of, say, a tree -- the image is in the form of light and dark pixels. It sends this image to the video processor, which converts the treeshaped pattern of pixels into a series of electrical pulses that represent "light" and "dark." The processor sends these pulses to a radio transmitter on the glasses, which then transmits the pulses in radio form to a receiver implanted underneath the subject's skin. The receiver is directly connected via a wire to the electrode array implanted at the back of the eye, and it sends the pulses down the wire.

When the pulses reach the retinal implant, they excite the electrode array. The array acts as the artificial equivalent of the retina's photoreceptors. The electrodes are stimulated in accordance with the encoded pattern of light and dark that represents the tree, as the retina's photoreceptors would be if they were working (except that the pattern wouldn't be digitally encoded). The electrical signals generated by the stimulated electrodes then travel as neural signals to the visual center of the brain by way of the normal pathways used by healthy eyes -- the optic nerves. In macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, the optical neural pathways aren't damaged. The brain, in turn, interprets these signals as a tree and tells the subject, "You're seeing a tree

of light It takes some training for subjects to actually see a tree. At first, they see mostly light and dark spots. But after a while, they learn to interpret what the brain is showing them, and they eventually perceive that pattern of light and dark as a tree.

BLOCK DIAGRAM

Typical Image Formation

Silicon Retina: The Second Approach

A silicon chip that faithfully mimics the neural circuitry of a real retina could lead to better bionic eyes for those with vision loss, researchers claim. The circuit is built with the mammalian retina as its blueprint. The chip contains light sensors and circuitry that functions in much the same way as nerves in a real retina they automatically filter the mass of visual data collected by the eye to leave only what the brain uses to build a picture of the world. To make the chip, a model of how light-sensitive neurons and other nerve cells in the retina connect to process light is created. A silicon version using manufacturing techniques already employed in the computer chip industry.

16

Artificial Retina Prosthesis using ASR (Artificial Silicon Retina)

ASR is a silicon chip 2 mm in diameter and 1/1000 in thickness. It contains 3500 microscopic solar cells called micro photodiodes. It converts light energy from images into thousands of tiny electrical impulses.

Changing Scene

The mammalian brain only receives new information from the eyes when something in a scene changes. This cuts down on the volume of information sent to the brain but is enough for it to work out what is happening in the world. The retina chip performs in the same way As well as having the potential to help humans with damaged vision, future versions of the retina chip could help robots too!

19

How it Works?

Movement of the scene or of an object with constant reflectance and illumination causes relative intensity change. Thus the pixels are intrinsically invariant to scene illumination and directly encode scene reflectance change. The events are output asynchronously on an AddressEvent bus, so they have much higher timing precision than the frame rate of a frame-based imager. Because the pixels locally respond to relative change of intensity, the device has a large intra-scene dynamic range.

20

The Images
The top image shows the raw output of the retina chip.

The middle one a picture processed from it.

The third shows how a moving face would appear.

21

LIMITATION

The bionic eye will only helpful for individuals who once had sight, because the brain must know how to process visual information. The optic nerve must also be at least partly functional. In many individuals that are born blind, the optic nerve has never been used, and part of the brain focuses on other abilities such as hearing and touch.

FUTURE ASPECTS

May be one day scientist will come up with a bionic eye which help inborn blind people able to see

Bibliography

www.wikipedea.com www.health.howstuffwork.com www.scribd.com