Smarter eEyes Focus on Cure for Blind - Technology For Change

Smarter eEyes Focus on Cure for Blind - Technology For Change: However, new research efforts are developing a technique that starts with a metallic seed that then grows all the repeated branching structures that in turn mate to the optic nerve behind the eye, thereby delivering to the brain the same kind of signals as retinal neurons.
The specific algorithm harnessed by the technique is called "diffusion limited aggregation," which researchers are using to grow image sensor interconnections that mimic a natural neural topology before being surgically implanted and interfaced to the optic nerve.

Hi-res detector used by researchers to map neural circuits of the retina

Hi-res detector used by researchers to map neural circuits of the retinaThe retinal readout device that made the experiments possible was inspired by detector technologies that physicists are using to search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. It was developed by an international team of high-energy physicists from the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) at UCSC, the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland, and the University of Glasgow, U.K. The system records neural signals at high speed (over ten million samples each second) and with fine spatial detail, sufficient to detect even a locally complete population of the tiny and densely spaced output cells known as "midget" retinal ganglion cells.