Love the fact that we are potentially involved in positive changes in the world (curing blindness no less, amongst other things).................
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(speculation only) - University of Santa Barbara
New technologies have the potential to greatly simplify the lives of humans, including those of blind individuals. One of the most promising types of tools designed to assist the blind are visual prostheses.
techxplore-com.cdn.ampproject.org
So far, the researchers evaluated the performance of their neural autoencoder-based approach in the context of visual neuroprostheses. They found that it achieved remarkable results, consistently leading to higher-quality visual perceptions across a wide range of virtual patients, which is a significant step forward in the path towards attaining reliable bionic vision.
The neural encoder created by the Granley and his colleagues generated far more convincing visual stimuli than other conventional encoding strategies, using the same training datasets. Notably, it could also easily be applied other neuroprostheses that can be described using a sensory model, including those designed to enhance the senses of hearing and touch.
"I'm excited about the potential broader impact of our framework," Granley said. "We were able to demonstrate the benefit gained by 'closing the loop on perception,' or in other words, including in-the-loop a model of the effects of stimulation on the patient's perception. This could be useful for a variety of prostheses. For example, cochlear implants could use this framework to improve auditory perceptions."
The model introduced by this team of researchers could eventually be used by developers to improve the quality of the vision enabled by visual neuroprosthetic devices. In addition, it could be applied to existing
prosthetic limbs to produce more convincing feelings of cutaneous touch in patients who are missing specific limbs or have undergone amputations.
"In this project, we only used virtual, simulated patients," Granley added. "In the future, I would like to test our encoder on human patients with implanted visual prostheses. If we could attain the same improvement on real patients, then this would mark a huge step towards restoring vision to millions of people suffering from blindness."
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