Optical imaging of electrically evoked visual signals in cats: I. Responses to corneal and intravitreal electrical stimulation.

Microelectronic retinal prostheses have been shown to restore the perception of light to the blind through electrical stimulation. Conventional recording techniques such as recording electrode arrays on the visual cortex can give a basic understanding of the events that occur during such stimulation events, but their finite size and number limits the spatial resolution achievable with them. Optical imaging of intrinsic signals (OIS imaging) allows for greater resolution (approximately 50 microm) of the activity in the cortex. This can be used to facilitate a greater understanding of the complex neurophysiological events that allow prosthetic vision. This paper shows responses to visual and electrical stimulation of the retina, and demonstrates that OIS imaging may be an effective technique in further refining stimulation techniques and implant designs for retinal prostheses.

Optical imaging of electrically evoked visual signals in cats: II. ICA "harmonic filtering" noise reduction.

Optical imaging of intrinsic signals (OIS) is a tool for visualizing differential areas in the primary visual cortex devoted to visual functions such as ocular dominance and spatial orientation preferences. The OIS methodology was employed to verify visual cortical response to a retinal vision prosthesis whereby electrical stimulation is applied to the neural retina in order to elicit visual percepts. However, OIS recording is quite susceptible to cardiac and respiratory artifact, and inherent noise related to the measurement process. This complicates the identification of evoked signals using standard ensemble averaging based image processing. We therefore developed an independent component analysis (ICA) "harmonic filtering" technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. This technique is capable of reducing noise components, highlighting response signals to visual and electrical stimuli. Particularly, we demonstrated extraction of an ocular dominance map due to corneal stimulation and localized cortical activation due to intravitreal stimulation.

Retinal neurostimulator for a multifocal vision prosthesis.

A neurostimulator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with scalable circuitry that can stimulate 14 channels, has been developed for an epi-retinal vision prosthesis. This ASIC was designed to allow seven identical units to be connected to control up to 98 channels, with the ability to stimulate 14 electrodes simultaneously. The neurostimulator forms part of a vision prosthesis, designed to restore vision to patients who have lost their sight due to retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. For charge balance, the neurostimulator was designed to stimulate with current sources and sinks operating together, and with the ability to drive a hexagonal mosaic of electrodes to reduce the electrical crosstalk that occurs when multiple bipolar stimulation sites are active simultaneously. A hexagonal mosaic of electrodes surrounds each stimulation site and has been shown to effectively isolate each site, increasing the ability to inject localized independent charge into multiple regions simultaneously.