AI-Powered Artificial Vision for Visual Prostheses

Conditions

• Blindness, Acquired

Eligibility Criteria

Sex

ALL

Age

18 Years - N/A

Healthy Volunteers

Accepted

Interventions

• Visual prosthesis — DEVICE
  In response to the stimulation/image on the monitor, subjects will be asked to either make a perceptual judgment or perform a simple behavioral task. Examples include detecting a stimulus ('did you see a light on that trial'), reporting size by drawing on a touch screen, or walking to a target location. Both patient response and reaction time will be recorded. In some cases, the investigators will also collect data measuring subjects' eye position. This is a noninvasive procedure that will be carried out using standard eye-tracking equipment via an infra-red camera that tracks the position of the subjects' pupil. Only measurements like eye position or eye blinks will be recorded, so these data do not contain identifiable information.

Study Details

Visual impairment is one of the ten most prevalent causes of disability and poses extraordinary challenges to individuals in our society that relies heavily on sight. Living with acquired blindness not only lowers the quality of life of these individuals, but also strains society's limited resources for assistance, care and rehabilitation. However, to date, there is no effective treatment for man patients who are visually handicapped as a result of degeneration or damage to the inner layers of the retina, the optic nerve or the visual pathways. Therefore, there are compelling reasons to pursue the development of a cortical visual prosthesis capable of restoring some useful sight in these profoundly blind patients. However, the quality of current prosthetic vision is still rudimentary. A major outstanding challenge is translating electrode stimulation into a code that the brain can understand. Interactions between the device electronics and the retinal neurophysiology lead to distortions that can severely limit the quality of the generated visual experience. Rather than aiming to one day restore natural vision (which may remain elusive until the neural code of vision is fully understood), one might be better off thinking about how to create practical and useful artificial vision now. The goal of this work is to address fundamental questions that will allow the development of a Smart Bionic Eye, a device that relies on AI-powered scene understanding to augment the visual scene (similar to the Microsoft HoloLens), tailored to specific real-world tasks that are known to diminish the quality of life of people who are blind (e.g., face recognition, outdoor navigation, reading, self-care).

Key Dates

Start date

Oct 2, 2023

Status verified

Jul 2025

Primary completion

Aug 31, 2027

Completion

Aug 31, 2027

Study Design

Enrollment

7 participants (estimated)

Allocation

NA

Intervention model

SINGLE_GROUP

Primary purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Arms

• Experimental: Perception resulting from AI-powered artificial vision
  The investigators will produce visual percepts in visual prosthesis patients either by directly stimulating electrodes (using FDA-approved pulse trains), or by asking them to view a computer or projector screen and using standard stimulation protocols (as is standardly used for their devices) to convert the computer or projector screen image into pulse trains on their electrodes. Informed by psychophysical data and computational models, the investigators will test the ability of different stimulus encoding methods to support simple perceptual and behavioral tasks (e.g., object recognition, navigation). These encoding methods may include computer vision and machine learning methods to highlight important objects in the scene or to highlight nearby obstacles and may be tailored to each individual patient.

Primary Outcome Measure

Phosphene shape [ Time Frame: through study completion, an average of 1 year ]

Locations (1)

Find similar trials in Santa Barbara, CA

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