Cellular migration into a subretinal honeycomb-shaped prosthesis for high-resolution prosthetic vision
Abstract
In patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a subretinal photovoltaic implant with 100 µm pixels provided visual acuity closely matching the pixel pitch. However, such flat bipolar pixels cannot be scaled below 75 µm, limiting the attainable visual acuity. This limitation can be overcome by shaping the electric field with 3-dimensional (3-D) electrodes. In particular, elevating the return electrode on top of the honeycomb-shaped vertical walls surrounding each pixel extends the electric field vertically and decouples its penetration into tissue from the pixel width. This approach relies on migration of the retinal cells into the honeycomb wells. Here, we demonstrate that majority of the inner retinal neurons migrate into the 25 µm deep wells, leaving the third-order neurons, such as amacrine and ganglion cells, outside. This enables selective stimulation of the second-order neurons inside the wells, thus preserving the intraretinal signal processing in prosthetic vision. Comparable glial response to that with flat implants suggests that migration and separation of the retinal cells by the walls does not cause additional stress. Furthermore, retinal migration into the honeycombs does not negatively affect its electrical excitability, while grating acuity matches the pixel pitch down to 40 μm and reaches the 27 μm limit of natural resolution in rats with 20 μm pixels. These findings pave the way for 3-D subretinal prostheses with pixel sizes of cellular dimensions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 13, 2023
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.2307380120
Entities
People
- Andrew Shin
- Bing-Yi Wang
- Daniel Palanker
- Efstathios Vounotrypidis
- Keith Mathieson
- Ludwig Galambos
- Mohajeet Balveer Bhuckory
- Theodore I Kamins
- Tiffany Huang
- Zhijie Charles Chen
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- National Eye Institute
- National Science Foundation
- Research to Prevent Blindness
- Royal Academy of Engineering
- Stanford University
- United States Department of Defense
- University of Strathclyde