Education

  • MS in Computer Science, 2020

    University of Colorado, School of Mines

  • BS in Computer Science, 2019

    University of Colorado, School of Mines

Project Lead

What do visual prosthesis users see, and why? Clinical studies have shown that the vision provided by current devices differs substantially from normal sight.

Rather than predicting perceptual distortions, one needs to solve the inverse problem: What is the best stimulus to generate a desired visual percept?

pulse2percept is an open-source Python simulation framework used to predict the perceptual experience of retinal prosthesis patients across a wide range of implant configurations.

Publications

We present a series of analyses on the shared representations between evoked neural activity in the primary visual cortex of a blind human with an intracortical visual prosthesis, and latent visual representations computed in deep neural networks.

We retrospectively analyzed phosphene shape data collected form three Argus II patients to investigate which neuroanatomical and stimulus parameters predict paired-phosphene appearance and whether phospehenes add up linearly.

We systematically incorporated neuroscience-derived architectural components into CNNs to identify a set of mechanisms and architectures that comprehensively explain neural activity in V1.

We propose a personalized stimulus encoding strategy that combines state-of-the-art deep stimulus encoding with preferential Bayesian optimization.

We show that a neurologically-inspired decoding of CNN activations produces qualitatively accurate phosphenes, comparable to phosphenes reported by real patients.

What is the required stimulus to produce a desired percept? Here we frame this as an end-to-end optimization problem, where a deep neural network encoder is trained to invert a known, fixed forward model that approximates the underlying biological system.

We present a phenomenological model that predicts phosphene appearance as a function of stimulus amplitude, frequency, and pulse duration.

We propose HBA-U-Net: a U-Net backbone with hierarchical bottleneck attention to highlight retinal abnormalities that may be important for fovea and optic disc segmentation in the degenerated retina.