Retinal implants could restore partial vision
In lab tests on rat retinas, a photovoltaic chip helps display images through special goggles
Specialized goggles that send information to solar cell–like chips implanted in the eyes may one day help some blind people see. The new implants, which have been tested in rat retinas in a dish, would require less invasive surgery than similar devices now being tested and offer a higher-resolution view of the world.
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The new system, reported online May 13 in Nature Photonics, still needs work before being tested in people. But one day it may return partial sight to people suffering from conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease that can lead to night blindness and tunnel vision, or macular degeneration, in which sharp central vision is lost but peripheral vision remains.
In those conditions, vision suffers when light-detecting cells at the back of the inner eye are damaged, even though the nerve cells that send visual information to the brain may remain intact.