Current epiretinal implants arrange their electrodes on a rectangular grid. “Some people have looked at where to place the whole implant on the retina”, says Prof. Beyeler. “Ashley was the first to ask, what if we moved every individual electrode around based on what we know about how these electrodes produce artificial vision?"

However, moving every electrode presents the problem of combinatorial explosion. Even in current devices with only 60 electrodes, there are many possibilities for arranging them. It is not usually technically feasible to find a solution.

“Ashley approached this as a greedy optimization problem, where one electrode is placed after another”, explains Prof. Beyeler. “We used a computational model of bionic vision to help predict what the vision would look like for a given electrode placement. By iterating over that, Ashley found a mathematically proven optimal solution."

Read the full article at rsipvision.com.

The paper has been accepted at MICCAI ‘22.