Rahmani Ali, Eom Kyungsik
Department of Electronics Engineering, College of Engineering, Pusan National University, Busan, Republic of Korea.
Department of Electronics, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Yadegar-e-Imam Khomeini (RAH) Shahre-e-Rey Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
Front Cell Neurosci. 2023 Jul 27;17:1205048. doi: 10.3389/fncel.2023.1205048. eCollection 2023.
Photovoltaic restoration of vision, especially in conjunction with the use of silicon photodiodes, has gained attention for use in patients affected by blindness due to retinal layer disease. Although the use of silicon photodiodes offers miniaturization of the implant unit and increase in the stimulation channel, the implant unit may suffer from the fracture of these brittle photodiodes when mechanical pressure exerted.
We present an organic solar cell (OSC)-based retinal prosthesis in which spherical gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are embedded into the active layer to increase the efficiency of the bioelectric interface.
We demonstrate computationally that a modeled OSC incorporating spherical AuNPs has three times higher efficiency than that of a bare OSC presented before for retinal prostheses. Our AuNP based OSC was able to activate the neuron at the minimum light intensity of 0.26 mW/mm, which is lower than that of the bare OSC.
The use of AuNPs in OSC allows device miniaturization or lowering of the light exposure required for neural activation using a photovoltaic retinal prosthesis, which can generally be applied in a broad range of neural prostheses.
视觉的光伏恢复，特别是与硅光电二极管结合使用时，已在因视网膜层疾病而失明的患者中受到关注。尽管使用硅光电二极管可使植入单元小型化并增加刺激通道，但当施加机械压力时，植入单元可能会因这些易碎的光电二极管破裂而受损。
我们展示了一种基于有机太阳能电池（OSC）的视网膜假体，其中球形金纳米颗粒（AuNPs）嵌入活性层以提高生物电界面的效率。
我们通过计算证明，包含球形AuNPs的模拟OSC的效率比之前用于视网膜假体的裸OSC高三倍。我们基于AuNP的OSC能够在最低光强度为0.26 mW/mm时激活神经元，这低于裸OSC。
在OSC中使用AuNPs可实现设备小型化或降低使用光伏视网膜假体进行神经激活所需的光照，这通常可应用于广泛的神经假体。
