Gianluca Lazzi, an Electrical Engineer at the University of Southern California https://www.usc.edu and colleagues received an award for $300,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) https://www.nsf.gov in 2018 to research how to encode color in a retinal prosthetic device.
Millions of people face the loss of their eyesight from degenerative eye diseases. Today, technology is available to offer partial eyesight to people with serious eye issues. Argus II, the first retinal prosthesis is able to reproduce some functions of a part of the eye’s essential vision.
However, the field of retinal prostheses is still in its infancy, but for hundreds of users around the globe, the present “bionic eye” enriches the way users can interact with the world on a daily basis. For example, seeing outlines of objects enables them to move in unfamiliar environments with increased safety.
Gianluca Lazzi and his colleagues have made progress in the recent NSF funded-research at the University of Southern California when they used an advanced computer model to discover in depth what happens in the retina. Their computer model reproduces the shapes and positions of millions of nerve cells in the eye as well as the physical and networking properties associated with them.
With the NSF funding, the researchers focused on models of nerve cells that transmit visual information from the eye to the brain. The researchers also identified potential ways now available to increase clarity and the researchers are working towards adding color vision to future retinal prosthetic devices.