Jan 21 2022

1/21 – James Weiland, University of Michigan

Biomedical Engineering Seminar

January 21, 2022

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Address

Chicago, IL

Watch this seminar live here>>

Speaker: James Weiland, PhD

Associate Chair for Research in Biomedical Engineering (Medical School)
Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Professor, Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
University of Michigan

Title: Electronic Visual Prostheses to Treat Blindness

Abstract:
Retinal prostheses have progressed from laboratory and early clinical experiments, to medical devices approved for sale by the FDA and European Union. Clinical trials and on-going clinical research studies have shown that individuals who have at best light perception vision, can use spatial information from the retinal prosthesis to detect motion and locate objects. Implant patients showed improvement in navigation and mobility, but the ability to recognize forms such as letters is inconsistent. To improve spatial resolution, future generations of retinal prosthesis will have a greater number of individual channels. Efficient optimization of large-scale devices will require computational approaches, since manual programming of thousands of individual channels is not practical. We have created patient-specific computational models and closed-loop optimization algorithms that will enable programming of stimulation output in a way that is personalized for each patient. We demonstrate the superiority of these computational approaches for predicting perceptual threshold in patients and for tuning stimulus parameters to achieve focal response patterns in a preclinical model. Adoption of such methods in clinical practice will efficiently optimize visual prosthesis function.

Contact

UIC Biomedical Engineering

Date posted

Jan 13, 2022

Date updated

Jan 18, 2022