School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Network & Information Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Artif Organs. 2022 Nov;46(11):2147-2158. doi: 10.1111/aor.14247. Epub 2022 Apr 12.
Most existing retinal prostheses contain a built-in visible-light camera module that captures images of the surrounding environment. Thus, in case of insufficient or lack of visible light, the camera fails to work, and the retinal prostheses enter a dormant or "OFF" state. A simple and effective solution is replacing the visible-light camera with a dual-mode camera. The present research aimed to achieve two main purposes: (1) to explore whether the dual-mode camera in prosthesis recipients works under no visible-light conditions and (2) to assess its performance.
To accomplish these aims, we enrolled subjects in a psychophysical experiment under simulated prosthetic vision conditions. We found that the subjects could complete some simple visual tasks, but the recognition performance under the infrared mode was significantly inferior to that under the visible-light mode. These results inspired us to develop and propose a feasible infrared image-enhancement processing algorithm. Another psychophysical experiment was performed to verify the feasibility of the algorithm.
The obtained results showed that the average efficiency of the subjects completing visual tasks using our enhancement algorithm (0.014 ± 0.001) was significantly higher (p < 0.001) than that of subjects using direct pixelization (0.007 ± 0.001).
We concluded that a dual-mode camera could be a feasible solution to improving the performance of retinal prostheses as the camera adapted better to the specific existing ambient light conditions. Dual-mode cameras combined with this infrared image-enhancement algorithm could provide a promising direction for the design of future retinal prostheses.
大多数现有的视网膜假体都包含一个内置的可见光摄像头模块，用于捕捉周围环境的图像。因此，在可见光不足或缺乏的情况下，摄像头无法正常工作，视网膜假体进入休眠或“关闭”状态。一个简单有效的解决方案是用双模摄像头取代可见光摄像头。本研究旨在实现两个主要目的：(1) 探索假体接受者中的双模摄像头在无可见光条件下是否能正常工作，(2) 评估其性能。
为了达到这些目的，我们在模拟假体视觉条件下进行了一项心理物理实验，招募了受试者。我们发现，受试者可以完成一些简单的视觉任务，但在红外模式下的识别性能明显低于可见光模式。这些结果促使我们开发并提出了一种可行的红外图像增强处理算法。我们还进行了另一个心理物理实验来验证该算法的可行性。
实验结果表明，使用我们的增强算法，受试者完成视觉任务的平均效率（0.014±0.001）明显更高（p<0.001），而直接像素化的效率（0.007±0.001）则明显更低。
我们得出结论，双模摄像头可以作为改善视网膜假体性能的可行解决方案，因为它可以更好地适应特定的现有环境光条件。双模摄像头与这种红外图像增强算法相结合，可以为未来视网膜假体的设计提供一个有前途的方向。
