Modern medicine can easily replace a human tooth root with a titanium screw, or return hearing, or install prothesis for a hand or a leg. What about human eye then? Is there a chance to make modern technologies restore human sight, at least partially, and provide an opportunity for a person to perceive and analyze what’s around?
Yes, there is such a chance, reassure the members of “Sensor-Tech” ANO (Autonomous Non-Commercial Organization) research laboratory, whose objective is to let sightless people see with the help of ELVIS, a neural implant (or Brain Computer Interface, BCI) which is implanted into the cerebral cortex. They plan to make it happen in 6 years.
What BCI is, how it is tested and how it will help people see the world — Denis Kuleshov, the director of “Sensor-Tech” laboratory, tells in his interview for “Special View” web-portal.
Q: Few years ago, first 2 patients got their bionic eye implants, and today “Sensor-Tech” laboratory is working on a cortex implant, which is supposed to return human sight as well. What is the difference between these devices, and which one is considered more effective?
A: Few years ago, those Russian patients got retinal implants, which were installed right into their retinas. Cortical implants, or BCI, which we are developing now, are placed into the visual cortex. Both implants provide same result — a person begins to see via “electronic sight”.
A retinal implant consists of around 60 electrodes, which is quite enough to let a patient distinguish the shapes and silhouettes of the objects. Such retinal implants, produced by American company “Second Sight Medical Products”, were provided to the Russian patients with the help of two foundations: “Art, science and sport” and “Co-operation”, and this was a truly break-through moment for Russian medicine. Nevertheless, the challenging aspect here is that such implants work only for those patients, who lost their sight because of very specific degenerative retina disorder — retinitis pigmentosa.
The number of patients, who will be able to see again thanks to cortical implants, is a lot bigger. It includes people, who became sightless for many different reasons, and even those, who lost eyes.
While you get the visual information via eyes, it is the brain that works on it and analyzes it. We put a camera on a patient’s head and connect it to the visual cortex, or, better say, to an implant installed into it. A tiny microcomputer, which is fastened to the waist, is responsible for image processing. In a nutshell, this is the process which enables the patient’s visual perception. It would be irrational to work on both retinal and cortical implants, and we fully concentrated on the cortical one, since we believe, that the problem has to be offered a complex solution.
Q: How does ELVIS, the cortical BCI, look like?
A: In simple words, the device consists of 2 parts — internal and external. The external one is a headband with cameras, which a person wears on his head, and a microcomputer on the waist, which processes the visual information from the cameras.
Audio description: photo collage in color. On a white background — the cortical neural implant ELVIS. Red headband with two cameras is connected via wire to a small black rectangular device with buttons — a microprocessor. Above them — a picture of the BCI itself — a silver microchip with electrodes.
The internal part is the implant itself, which is installed into the brain. The outer part of the device is ready, and now we are developing the inner part, and doing animal testing. After every single modification of the implant’s structure, we need to conduct a testing cycle. This is a mandatory requirement for any development of any medical device. Currently we are working on algorithms of visual cortex stimulation. We need to understand the role of the electrical currents and to ensure our electronics cope with impulse transfer, with no harm. Today we test everything on rats. Of course, we do not blind them on purpose. Instead, we stimulate their brain via electrodes so that to get response not in the visual cortex, but in motor cortex — we direct the electronic impulse a bit aside, and the animal’s whiskers start twitching. Such movement might be slightly noticeable and captured only by a special video camera, but it provides us a lot of information.
We will get more remarkable results when we start testing on monkeys, which is planned for next year. First, the monkeys are trained to point at particular objects on the computer screen with a joystick, then we implant the BCI into their brain, cover their eyes with a black mask and begin to stimulate the BCI. The flares, that the monkeys have observed on the monitor before, will go to their visual cortex, but they will have to actually see them with their eyes already closed, with no monitor in front of them. If the animals see the flares, they will point at them with the joystick. As a result of such scientific research, we will ensure, that the neural implant will allow people to see with no eyes involved.
Only after all the animal tests are finished, all special protocols are filled in and signed, all challenging procedure are done, we will get the right to submit the documents to Rospotrebnadzor in order to patent a new medical device and conduct first tests on humans. Once the official approval is obtained, we will implant the BCIs in the first sightless patients. This will, of course, happen under supervision of the leading neurosurgery centers and will take around
Q: How long has the science been developing the cortical implants?
A: It goes back to 1970s, when such implants were shortly piloted in US, as part of the experiment. Such devices were huge: a lot of wires covered patient’s head, and a giant computer was fastened to the waist. What’s important — that moment the fundamental principle was established: yes, neural implants can make people see, i.e. get the visual information. Since then, scientists from all over the world have been working on improving the cortical implants. The progress was critically impeded by the poor development of the electronics, which made it impossible to create small computers and get rid of multiple wires. Probably around 2010s a dozen of laboratories were established, that focused their research on neural implants, and “Second Sight Medical Products” is considered the leading one. They are also half-step ahead of us. They have already implanted the system in 6 people and are currently testing it. Their BCI system resembles ours: there is a camera and a matrix installed into the brain.
Audio description: photo collage in color. A slim young brunette man is standing sideways near a blue wall. He is dressed in a blue shirt and beige trousers and wears ELVIS system — with a red headband on his head and microcomputer at his waist. The picture of the implant is placed close to his temple.
Q: How will a person with such an implant see? Will his sight be different in any way?
A: Surely, the sight that a person will get after the implant installation with be different, electronic. A human eye includes retina, which consists of millions of dots or cells, while the retinal implants had only 150 electrodes (which equals 60 pixels). The device we are currently developing will create a picture of
Q: Will it be possible to implant BCIs in those patients who are sightless from birth? How will they get the picture?
A: Actually, the BCIs can be implanted even in those people who see well — they will just see the flares of light coming above the usual visual image. In the future it might be possible to connect the human brain to gadgets this way, so that a person could read a message without taking his phone out of the pocket. Well, I am dreaming. Anyway, we can be pretty sure, that BCIs will be most effective for people with acquired blindness since their visual cortex is already developed. Such people’s brain stores images and visuals, silhouettes, shapes of objects, and the moment they get the information about what surrounds them, the brain will connect this information with the past visual experience to build the right associations. We don’t know exactly how the brain of a person, who never saw, will react after the implant installation. We assume, that it will start learning to use the “new vision”, and this process will be time-consuming. It might be that the “electronic sight” of a person, who is blind from birth, will not be as good as the sight of a patient with acquired blindness, or vice versa. We don’t know for sure. Today there are too few people with BCIs in the world and we do not own enough clinical evidence to draw certain conclusions. But when such systems are widely spread, we will know for certain about their effectiveness for the patients with congenital blindness. So far there are no medical limitation towards implanting the BCIs.
