Medtronic Chair in Neuroengineering, Center for Neuroprosthetics and Institute of Bioengineering, School of Engineering, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Geneva, Switzerland.
The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy.
Nat Biomed Eng. 2020 Feb;4(2):181-194. doi: 10.1038/s41551-019-0446-8. Epub 2019 Aug 19.
Retinal prostheses can restore a functional form of vision in patients affected by dystrophies of the outer retinal layer. Beyond clinical utility, prostheses for the stimulation of the optic nerve, the visual thalamus or the visual cortex could also serve as tools for studying the visual system. Optic-nerve stimulation is particularly promising because it directly activates nerve fibres, takes advantage of the high-level information processing occurring downstream in the visual pathway, does not require optical transparency and could be effective in cases of eye trauma. Here we show, in anaesthetized rabbits and with support from numerical modelling, that an intraneural electrode array with high mechanical stability placed in the intracranial segment of the optic nerve induces, on electrical stimulation, selective activation patterns in the visual cortex. These patterns are measured as electrically evoked cortical potentials via an ECoG array placed in the contralateral cortex. The intraneural electrode array should enable further investigations of the effects of electrical stimulation in the visual system and could be further developed as a visual prosthesis for blind patients.
视网膜假体可以为受外视网膜层营养不良影响的患者恢复功能性视觉。除了临床应用之外，视神经、视丘脑或视皮层刺激的假体也可以作为研究视觉系统的工具。视神经刺激特别有前景，因为它可以直接激活神经纤维，利用视觉通路上游的高级信息处理，不需要光学透明度，并且在眼外伤的情况下也可能有效。在这里，我们在麻醉的兔子中进行了研究，并得到了数值建模的支持，证明了一种具有高机械稳定性的神经内电极阵列，放置在视神经的颅内段，可在电刺激下诱导视觉皮层的选择性激活模式。这些模式通过放置在对侧皮层的 ECoG 阵列作为电诱发皮层电位进行测量。神经内电极阵列应能进一步研究电刺激对视觉系统的影响，并可进一步开发为盲人的视觉假体。
