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A model of ganglion axon pathways accounts for percepts elicited by retinal implants.
Degenerative retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration cause irreversible vision loss in more than 10 million people worldwide. Retinal prostheses, now implanted in over 250 patients worldwide, electrically stimulate surviving cells in order to evoke neuronal responses that are interpreted by the brain as visual percepts ('phosphenes'). However, instead of seeing focal spots of light, current implant users perceive highly distorted phosphenes that vary in shape both across subjects and electrodes. We characterized these distortions by asking users of the Argus retinal prosthesis system (Second Sight Medical Products Inc.) to draw electrically elicited percepts on a touchscreen. Using ophthalmic fundus imaging and computational modeling, we show that elicited percepts can be accurately predicted by the topographic organization of optic nerve fiber bundles in each subject's retina, successfully replicating visual percepts ranging from 'blobs' to oriented 'streaks' and 'wedges' depending on the retinal location of the stimulating electrode. This provides the first evidence that activation of passing axon fibers accounts for the rich repertoire of phosphene shape commonly reported in psychophysical experiments, which can severely distort the quality of the generated visual experience. Overall our findings argue for more detailed modeling of biological detail across neural engineering applications
Wafer-Level Parylene Packaging With Integrated RF Electronics for Wireless Retinal Prostheses
This paper presents an embedded chip integration
technology that incorporates silicon housings and flexible
Parylene-based microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices.
Accelerated-lifetime soak testing is performed in saline at elevated
temperatures to study the packaging performance of Parylene C
thin films. Experimental results show that the silicon chip under
test is well protected by Parylene, and the lifetime of Parylenecoated
metal at body temperature (37°C) is more than 60 years,
indicating that Parylene C is an excellent structural and packaging
material for biomedical applications. To demonstrate the proposed
packaging technology, a flexible MEMS radio-frequency (RF) coil
has been integrated with an RF identification (RFID) circuit die.
The coil has an inductance of 16 μH with two layers of metal
completely encapsulated in Parylene C, which is microfabricated
using a Parylene–metal–Parylene thin-film technology. The chip
is a commercially available read-only RFID chip with a typical
operating frequency of 125 kHz. The functionality of the embedded
chip has been tested using an RFID reader module in both air
and saline, demonstrating successful power and data transmission
through the MEMS coil
Scattering of a Tightly Focused Beam by an Optically Trapped Particle
Near-forward scattering of an optically trapped 5 m radius polystyrene latex sphere by the trapping beam was examined both theoretically and experimentally. Since the trapping beam is tightly focused, the beam fields superpose and interfere with the scattered fields in the forward hemisphere. The observed light intensity consists of a series of concentric bright and dark fringes centered about the forward scattering direction. Both the number of fringes and their contrast depend on the position of the trapping beam focal waist with respect to the sphere. The fringes are caused by diffraction due to the truncation of the tail of the trapping beam as the beam is transmitted through the sphere
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