Portable Image Processing Platform for Retinal Prosthesis (2022-2024)

Portable Image Processing Platform for Retinal Prosthesis (2022-2024)

subjects around the world. The majority of cases are caused by cataracts, but there is a large minority due to untreatable retinal diseases. For this cohort, the most promising method to restore vision is through prosthetic means. Although exciting progress is being done in the field, current commercial systems are rudimentary, do not provide sufficient vision to change the user’s capacity to work. Future generations will improve, but driving is unlikely to be possible for some time. If this is coupled with Imaging camera Optical adjuster Clinical corneal lens Preliminary data from dummy eye Preliminary data from a rabbit eye the current high cost of around €100k per eye, the cost-benefit analysis is simply prohibitive in countries such as Egypt. Much of the cost of such devices stems from a combination of complex low volume microsystem production and the daylong surgical process to implant them. An alternative approach is to use an optogenetics retinal prosthesis. It is a gene therapy approach to make a different layer of the eye light sensitive albeit to very intense light. Implementation requires a simple injection of the gene therapy agent and a headset, which can be adapted from the rising augmented reality field to pre-process the scene before sending it to the patient. As such the cost will be at least an order of magnitude less and vision returned better. A key aspect of this new technique is to maximize the useful information transferred to the patient. Simple things such as enhancing contrast of key features (e.g. people/faces), and removing unnecessary textures (e.g. carpet patterns) can help. However, more processes should be done on the scene for emphasizing the salient or region of interest prior to transmission for retinal stimulations. As such our aims in this project are as follows: 1. Build an image processing platform to be generally used for retinal prosthesis systems and specifically for those using optogenetics approach. The platform has to be portable, fast, low-power and smart enough to cope with different environmental conditions. 2. Test the developed platform on real subjects with simulated visual impairment conditions