Return vision to people with an AI eye implant

It is a historical milestone.

For the first time in history, an artificially intelligent eye implant restored the ability to see to people who had completely lost their vision, a historic milestone in medicine and neural implant technology. This device called PRIMA was tested in a European clinical trial led by University College London and Morefield's Eye Hospital and showed very promising and interesting results; 84% of patients once again recognized letters, numbers, even complete words, many of them before surgery could not even distinguish a vision board.

The study volunteers suffered from geographic atrophy, the advanced form of age-related macular degeneration, one of the leading causes of blindness in the world and until now with no treatment available. An estimated 5 million people live with this condition, which destroys the photoreceptor cells in the retina and prevents central vision.

The PRIMA is the first implant in the world capable of restoring the completely blind eye. It only measures 2 mm by 2 mm, the size of a SIM card that is placed under the central retina and a surgery that lasts less than 2 hours; The procedure can be performed by any trained vitreous and retinal surgeon, making it potentially accessible to patients on a mass scale. How the Prime works is an ingenious combination of electronics, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

After the implant, the patient uses glasses equipped with a high-precision camera connected to a small computer attached to the waist. This camera captures the environment and projects the images as beams of infrared light directly on the chip. Inside the eye, artificial intelligence algorithms convert the light into electrical signals that are sent by the optic nerve to the brain, recreating a new form of visual perception.

With time and training, patients learn to move their eyes and adjust focus to recognize letters and words and a process similar to relearning to read. None of the participants had additional loss of peripheral vision, which means that the implant acts only where there was total blindness before.

Patients describe the sensation of seeing letters again as “exciting and transformative”, because before it was like having two black discs in your eyes, now I can read crosswords, labels and books again, this has given hope back to many patients with this degeneration. The study involved 38 patients from 17 hospitals in Europe.

The device was developed by Science Corporation, a company specializing in brain-computer interfaces and neural engineering; The question that remains is, if today artificial intelligence can restore sight to those who lived in darkness, the future seems promising.