Photovoltaic restoration of sight with high visual acuity in rats with retinal degeneration

D. Palanker; Georges Goetz; H. Lorach; Yossi Mandel M.D.; Richard Smith; David Boinagrov; Xin Lei; Theodore I. Kamins; J. Harris Jr.; K. Mathieson; A. Sher

doi:10.1117/12.2081068

20 March 2015 Photovoltaic restoration of sight with high visual acuity in rats with retinal degeneration

D. Palanker, Georges Goetz, H. Lorach, Yossi Mandel M.D., Richard Smith, David Boinagrov, Xin Lei, Theodore I. Kamins, J. Harris Jr., K. Mathieson, A. Sher

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9307, Ophthalmic Technologies XXV; 93070T (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2081068
Event: SPIE BiOS, 2015, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Patients with retinal degeneration lose sight due to gradual demise of photoreceptors. Electrical stimulation of the surviving retinal neurons provides an alternative route for delivery of visual information. Subretinal photovoltaic arrays with 70μm pixels were used to convert pulsed near-IR light (880-915nm) into pulsed current to stimulate the nearby inner retinal neurons. Network-mediated responses of the retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) could be modulated by pulse width (1-20ms) and peak irradiance (0.5-10 mW/mm²). Similarly to normal vision, retinal response to prosthetic stimulation exhibited flicker fusion at high frequencies, adaptation to static images, and non-linear spatial summation. Spatial resolution was assessed in-vitro and in-vivo using alternating gratings with variable stripe width, projected with rapidly pulsed illumination (20-40Hz). In-vitro, average size of the electrical receptive fields in normal retina was 248±59μm – similar to their visible light RF size: 249±44μm. RGCs responded to grating stripes down to 67μm using photovoltaic stimulation in degenerate rat retina, and 28μm with visible light in normal retina. In-vivo, visual acuity in normally-sighted controls was 29±5μm/stripe, vs. 63±4μm/stripe in rats with subretinal photovoltaic arrays, corresponding to 20/250 acuity in human eye. With the enhanced acuity provided by eye movements and perceptual learning in human patients, visual acuity might exceed the 20/200 threshold of legal blindness. Ease of implantation and tiling of these wireless arrays to cover a large visual field, combined with their high resolution opens the door to highly functional restoration of sight.

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D. Palanker, Georges Goetz, H. Lorach, Yossi Mandel M.D., Richard Smith, David Boinagrov, Xin Lei, Theodore I. Kamins, J. Harris Jr., K. Mathieson, and A. Sher "Photovoltaic restoration of sight with high visual acuity in rats with retinal degeneration", Proc. SPIE 9307, Ophthalmic Technologies XXV, 93070T (20 March 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2081068

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