Bionic eye success in sight

From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:23:19 -0400
The Australian
Monday, October 22, 2007

Bionic eye success in sight

By Jennifer Foreshew 

AUSTRALIA is well positioned to win the race to develop the world's first 
bionic eye, with a clinical proof of concept expected within three years, 
project researchers say.

Dr Parker, right, Professor Lovell, centre, and associate professor Suaning
The bionic eye project, expected to cost $40 million over the next five years, 
involves the technology research centre of excellence, NICTA, along with the 
Australian Vision Prosthesis Group at the University of NSW, the Bionic Ear 
Institute and the Centre for Eye Research. 

NICTA chief operating officer Phil Robertson said planning on the project began 
about 18 months ago and details of a basic strategy would be pinned down by the 
end of this year. 

"In the past year NICTA has been building an awareness of what is needed and an 
understanding of the different perspectives of the various groups," Dr 
Robertson said. 

"We expect to kick off this large-scale project probably at the beginning of 
next year." 

The bionic eye is expected to do for visually impaired people what the 
Australian-developed cochlear implant, or bionic ear, did for hearing impaired 
people. 

John Parker, a consultant working on NICTA's Biomedical and Life Sciences 
Strategy, said the project's progression would be along the lines of the 
cochlear implant's development. 

"In the early days of cochlear implants, they were originally designed as a 
simple aid to lip-reading," said Dr Parker, who was previously Cochlear's chief 
technology officer. 

"One of the things that will happen early on with a visual implant is that you 
might provide a simple visual input to allow people to navigate a pathway." 

"It won't happen overnight, but it will happen through providing immediate 
benefits with simple things that you can do, and then learning from how they 
work and progressively developing the appropriate technology." 

Dr Parker said the team had to establish answers to some basic scientific 
questions. "The nerves in the eye have an extraordinarily complex arrangement, 
and as a lot of what you see and how you process information that comes into 
the eye actually occurs in your retina, it is very different from the way the 
ear works," he said. 

It could be a decade or more before there was a commercial product on the 
market, Dr Parker said. "I would hope that we have clinical proof of the 
concept sorted out within three years." 

At least three other teams around the world are also working to develop the 
bionic eye. 

"We think Australia, particularly with the skills that come from these 
different groups, is uniquely placed with respect to those other groups that 
are working on it because we have people who have done this before for 
hearing," Dr Parker said. 

"I don't know that any of the other companies have the depth of computer vision 
and image analysis that we can draw on to do this - so we approach this whole 
thing with a reasonably high level of confidence."


http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22630828-15306,00.html
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Bionic eye success in sight

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