No more blind mice? Prosthetic device sends images directly to brain - and could help humans

Blind mice could be a thing of the past thanks to a new prosthetic device that’s been tested on the animals.
A Weill Medical College of Cornell University team has developed a device that takes information from the outside world and decodes it into a pattern that the brain can ‘read’ as an image.
What’s more, they are hoping that it could be used to help blind humans in less than a decade.

Eye eye: Researchers developed a device that helped to restore the vision of mice

Neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg, the lead researcher, explained at a TEDMED seminar in San Diego recently that the key was converting the data into patterns of electrical activity for the brain to process.
She said: ‘I study how the brain uses patterns of electrical activity to see, to hear, to reach for an object.
I’ve been starting to use what we’ve learned about these patterns of electricity to develop prosthetic devices.’
She explained that if a person has a retinal disease, there’s very little that can be done for them, with drug treatments only effective on a small number of sufferers.
There are prosthetic devices, but they only allow patients to see simple images, mainly just outlines.
Professor Nirenberg describes her device as something ‘that could make a difference’.
She told the audience that the retina contains circuits that process images, but that these circuits can die from disease.
The device she’s pioneered ‘mimics the action of the front end circuitry of the retina’, enabling images to be fired to the brain once more.
So far it’s only been tested on mice, but when asked if it could be adapted for humans in 10 years, she replied: ‘I’m hoping less.’