Amazing eye implant the size of a brain cell may cure blindness

(STUDY FINDS) -- Revolutionary treatments often start with a small idea — or, in this case, a tiny implant. As part of the effort to cure blindness, a team of European scientists have designed an extremely small eye implant that more effectively converts electrical signals into visual images in the brain.

Blindness is often the result of some part of the eye being damaged. However, this does not affect the visual cortex in the brain. It remains active and awaits messages from the eye about the external world. Unfortunately, they never come.

Inserting a visual implant in people who are blind is not a new concept. However, since its inception in the 1990s, implant technology has dealt with several challenges. An implant requires thousands of electrodes to mimic the electrical signals the eye sends to the brain to generate a visual image. A single electrode represents only one pixel of information. An implant’s bulky size and potential scarring of the brain make it difficult to house electrodes there for long periods of time.

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