Photovoltaic retinal prosthesis restores high-resolution responses to single-pixel stimulation in blind retinas

Retinal prostheses hold the promise of restoring vision in totally blind people. However, a decade of clinical trials highlighted quantitative limitations hampering the possibility of reaching this goal. A key challenge in retinal stimulation is to independently activate retinal neurons over a large...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications materials 2021-03, Vol.2 (1), p.1-16, Article 28
Main Authors: Chenais, Naïg Aurelia Ludmilla, Airaghi Leccardi, Marta Jole Ildelfonsa, Ghezzi, Diego
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/2613/1786
639/166/985
Artificial vision
Blind people
Blindness
Chemistry and Materials Science
Cognition
Discrimination
High resolution
Illumination
Irradiance
Materials Science
Neurons
Pixels
Prostheses
Sensory stimulation
Spatial resolution
Visual fields
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Summary:Retinal prostheses hold the promise of restoring vision in totally blind people. However, a decade of clinical trials highlighted quantitative limitations hampering the possibility of reaching this goal. A key challenge in retinal stimulation is to independently activate retinal neurons over a large portion of the subject’s visual field. Reaching such a goal would significantly improve the perception accuracy in retinal implants’ users, along with their spatial cognition, attention, ambient mapping and interaction with the environment. Here we show a wide-field, high-density and high-resolution photovoltaic epiretinal prosthesis for artificial vision (POLYRETINA). The prosthesis embeds 10,498 physically and functionally independent photovoltaic pixels, allowing for wide retinal coverage and high-resolution stimulation. Single-pixel illumination reproducibly induced network-mediated responses from retinal ganglion cells at safe irradiance levels. Furthermore, POLYRETINA allowed response discrimination with a high spatial resolution equivalent to the pixel pitch (120 µm) thanks to the network-mediated stimulation mechanism. This approach could allow mid-peripheral artificial vision in patients with retinitis pigmentosa. A major challenge artificial retinas face is being able to activate neurons across a wide visual field. Here, a photovoltaic epiretinal prosthetic with over 10,000 pixels shows wide retinal coverage and single-pixel illumination, offering high spatial resolution discrimination in mouse models.
ISSN:2662-4443
2662-4443
DOI:10.1038/s43246-021-00133-2