Lo Pei-An, Huang Kyana, Zhou Qifa, Humayun Mark S, Yue Lan
Roski Eye Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA.
Ginsburg Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA.
Micromachines (Basel). 2020 Oct 13;11(10):929. doi: 10.3390/mi11100929.
Ultrasound is an emerging method for non-invasive neuromodulation. Studies in the past have demonstrated that ultrasound can reversibly activate and inhibit neural activities in the brain. Recent research shows the possibility of using ultrasound ranging from 0.5 to 43 MHz in acoustic frequency to activate the retinal neurons without causing detectable damages to the cells. This review recapitulates pilot studies that explored retinal responses to the ultrasound exposure, discusses the advantages and limitations of the ultrasonic stimulation, and offers an overview of engineering perspectives in developing an acoustic retinal prosthesis. For comparison, this article also presents studies in the ultrasonic stimulation of the visual cortex. Despite that, the summarized research is still in an early stage; ultrasonic retinal stimulation appears to be a viable technology that exhibits enormous therapeutic potential for non-invasive vision restoration.
超声是一种新兴的非侵入性神经调节方法。过去的研究表明，超声可以可逆地激活和抑制大脑中的神经活动。最近的研究显示，使用频率范围为0.5至43兆赫的超声激活视网膜神经元而不造成可检测到的细胞损伤是有可能的。这篇综述概括了探索视网膜对超声暴露反应的初步研究，讨论了超声刺激的优点和局限性，并概述了开发声学视网膜假体的工程学观点。为作比较，本文还介绍了超声刺激视觉皮层的研究。尽管如此，这些总结的研究仍处于早期阶段；超声视网膜刺激似乎是一种可行的技术，对非侵入性视力恢复具有巨大的治疗潜力。
