20.109ResearchProposal:RetinalImplants

Overview: Retinal implants have been identified as a possible remedy for blindness. However, in addition to the problems encountered by other forms of transplantation, retinal transplantation carries with it the additional challenges of not being able to graft tissue from the host in the case of optic nerve death and difficulty in connecting existing nerves to an implant. In a recent paper, Yagi et al. have developed a retinal implant that could restore vision to patients to the extent of a “twinkling stars in the sky” image. In our project, we could think about ways to make the implant higher resolution, or add color-detection capability.

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References: Yagi, T., Watanabe, M., Ohnishi, Y., Okuma, S., & Mukai, T. (2005). Biohybrid retinal implant: research and development update in 2005. Proc 2nd Inter IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, 248-51.