People with type 2 diabetes, and coma patients who manage to wake up, can experience vision loss, a loss that can now be treated without the need for invasive procedures.
It has been a research team from the University of Southern California that has presented a new model of treatment based on ultrasound, a treatment that can stimulate the neurons of the retina and restore the loss of vision of these people.
This type of vision loss also comes with age, since they are degenerative diseases of the retina, progressive degeneration of light-sensitive receptors. Research has been going on for a long time to develop some technology to solve this problem, since until now there was only invasive surgery that requires the implantation of electrode devices inside the eye.
This new approach is non-surgical, but at the moment only animal studies are being done, using ultrasound stimulation to replace electrical stimulation.
Qifa Zhou, a professor of biomedical engineering and ophthalmology at USC, is the one who led the study. She worked with Mark S. Humayun, one of the inventors of Argus II, the world’s first artificial retina.
To carry out the treatment, a portable ultrasound device will be used that will stimulate the retina by applying mechanical pressure to the eye. This process will make the neurons activate and send signals to the brain.
They have achieved this with a blind rat and high-frequency ultrasound waves, measuring the activity of the animal’s visual cortex through an array of electrodes.
They will now test it on non-human primates, and then adapt it to create a wireless lens transducer designed for humans.
