DailyDirt: Do You See What I See?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Blindness or visual impairment affects hundreds of millions of people around the world. Thankfully, cataract surgery and other treatments have reduced the effects of some vision problems, but unfortunately, there are still a few forms of blindness that aren't very treatable. Until someone figures out how to transplant an entire eyeball (which some doctors are actually working on), here are a few other ways that might help restore some sight.

• The field of optogenetics is studying how to control the activity of nerve cells with light, but shining lights through a fiber-optic cable implanted in a brain is a bit more invasive than injecting some DNA into an eyeball. RetroSense Therapeutics is testing a way to restore some sight to blind patients -- by injecting eyes with viruses containing DNA from light-sensitive algae. We've mentioned this approach a few years ago, but it's taken some time to actually get to a trial with human subjects. [url]
• Stem cells have been used to re-grow the lenses in infants who would have been blind from congenital cataracts. This procedure seems to have preferable results compared to the standard method of removing lenses and inserting artificial ones -- and if this can be done more generally, the use of stem cells in regenerative therapies could become more common. [url]
• A head-mounted geomagnetic sensor (aka a compass) on a blind lab rat was connected to its brain and allowed the rat to navigate a maze nearly as well as a mouse with normal vision. This could mean "smart" canes for people that can indicate cardinal directions for the visually impaired -- or implants that could give anyone the additional sense of magnetic fields. [url]

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Filed Under: blind, blindness, dna, health, low vision, retina, senses, stem cells, vision, visual impairment, visually impaired
Companies: retrosense therapeutics

DailyDirt: Artificial Intelligence Is Starting To See Things Now

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Artificial intelligence projects have gotten more attention over the past few years as some major milestones have been achieved and point to a promising future for AI (or cognitive computing or whatever we want to call it now). Software is getting better and better at recognizing what we're writing and saying... and now it's getting better at seeing what we're up to. Check out a few of these projects where computers are identifying visual images and correctly identifying a wide variety of things.

• Microsoft Research has bested its AI competitors at the 6th annual ImageNet image recognition competition -- with a classification error rate of just 3.5 percent (down from >24% in 2011). Perhaps someday these algorithms will be able to replace volunteer humans who currently classify various objects for other people. [url]
• Facebook's image recognition software can identify a surprising number of objects and activities. A semi-automated Facebook M might be more efficient or helpful than a pure AI or a pure human service, but it may be difficult to surpass the human standard (unless compared to a cable company's customer service). [url]
• MIT researchers working on a system designed to recognize specific scenes -- also gained the ability to identify objects without explicit programming to do so. Computer vision is improving significantly, and it's starting to piece together visual context in a similar way we do, but without us telling it how we do it. [url]

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Filed Under: ai, algorithms, artificial intelligence, blindness, computer vision, image recognition, machine learning, mit
Companies: facebook, google, intel, microsoft, qualcomm, tencent

DailyDirt: Restoring Sight

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The visually impaired are a sizable group of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Some vision problems are easily corrected with glasses or contacts or various kinds of laser-based eye surgery. However, some retinal problems are much more difficult (or impossible) to treat. Retinal surgery isn't fun at all, but it can be the preferred option when given the choice between blindness and some amount of vision. Check out a few of these developments that could help people see a little bit more.

• A prosthetic retina made from carbon nanotubes embedded in a flexible film could help restore vision to low-vision people someday. Researchers have tested this on lab animals and observed an ability to stimulate neurons -- which is a promising first step. [url]
• A 1.55 millimeter-thick contact lens system can activate a "zoom" function when the person wearing them winks. These contacts need to be paired with smart glasses to detect the winking and provide the telescopic zoom, so it's probably not something people with 20/20 vision would want, but for people who have reduced eyesight (or folks who just like supervision gadgets), this could be really useful. [url]
• Another kind of prosthetic retina has infrared-sensitive tiles (like CCD pixels) and a pair of glasses beaming a live infrared video feed onto them -- that stimulate nerves and ideally reproduce some kind of vision. Any kind of artificial retina implant needs to be unpowered (or powered wirelessly) because no one wants to have invasive eye surgery to charge batteries (or have the risk of an uncontrolled electrical discharge in an eye), so zapping retinas with infrared light seems like a reasonable solution -- especially if the pixel resolution can get close to 20/100 vision in an otherwise blind person. [url]

Bionic eyes are going to take a long time to develop, so in the meantime, check out this holiday gift guide for some awesome deals at the Techdirt deals store.

Filed Under: artificial retinas, blind, blindness, contact lenses, low vision, prosthetic retina, retinal implant, vision, visually impaired

DailyDirt: Three Blind Mice... Cured Someday?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

An estimated 285 million people (worldwide) have some blindness or visual impairment. About 43% of those visually impaired around the world are people who need glasses but don't have them. However, there are obviously blind people who have more severe vision problems that are more technologically difficult to fix. Some kids with blindness are learning how to echolocate nowadays, but that's a skill that gets harder to learn as a person ages. Here are just a few other ways that might restore vision to people someday.

• A chemical injection into mouse eyes has been shown to make "blind" cells in the retina sensitive to light again. The effects of acrylamide-azobenzene-quaternary ammonium (AAQ) eventually wears off, but it is far less invasive than retinal implants or other procedures. [url]
• Retinal prostheses are being developed, too. However, implants require an invasive surgical procedure, and so far the resolution isn't quite comparable to a Geordi La Forge visor. [url]
• Eye injuries are a serious problem for the military, so doctors are coming up with plausible ways to perform entire eye transplants. The University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has some funding to work on eye transplants and how to regrow cells to mend severed optic nerves. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: aaq, blindness, cure, echolocation, eyes, health, low vision, organ transplant, retina, retinal prosthesis, treatments, vision, visual impairment, visually impaired

Cures For Paralysis, Diabetes And Blindness Hindered By Patents

from the more-people-are-figuring-it-out dept

We've talked a lot about how patents actually hinder the rate of innovation in many research areas. That's because nearly all innovation does not work on "the one big breakthrough" theory, but on incremental improvements over time, that all add up to big changes. But when you put a tollbooth and a decades-long monopoly on each incremental change, you massively slow down the rate of innovation. And, it's even worse in scientific research areas. That's because a lot of successful scientific innovation comes about from researchers sharing data and information with each other to get the ideas and inspirations to make the next leap. But with the rise in patenting basic science, scientists have been holding back information, slowing down their own breakthroughs.

Thankfully, more and more people are recognizing this issue. Scientists working on things involving embryonic stem cell research are complaining that patents are massively hindering their ability to advance their research, and it may be holding back cures for paralysis, diabetes and blindness, among other things.

Lanza recalls bumping up against his company's main competitor, Geron Corporation, when it came to researching stem cells in reversing diabetes, a process he said he had been working on with animals for many years.

"When I came to ACT to try to do it with stem cells I couldn't because the rights to use embryonic stem cells for diabetes had been exclusively licensed to Geron," he said.

"Here I was, a scientist trying to cure diabetes and I couldn't use my entire lifetime of expertise to try and develop that technology," he said.

The article notes that if the US keeps this up, other countries are likely to leapfrog us in terms of the research that they do, creating huge commercial opportunities and life-saving treatments, while the US wastes away fighting each other in court. Yet another reason why President Obama's suggestion that we're more innovative because we get more patents is completely off the mark.

Filed Under: blindness, diabetes, paralysis, patents, research, science, stem cells