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Publication
Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Retinal prostheses have been developed to fight blindness in people affected by outer retinal layer dystrophies. To date, few hundred patients have received a retinal implant. Inspired by intraocular lenses, we have designed a foldable and photovoltaic wide-field epiretinal prosthesis (named POLYRETINA) capable of stimulating wireless retinal ganglion cells. Here we show that within a visual angle of 46.3 degrees, POLYRETINA embeds 2215 stimulating pixels, of which 967 are in the central area of 5 mm, it is foldable to allow implantation through a small scleral incision, and it has a hemispherical shape to match the curvature of the eye. We demonstrate that it is not cytotoxic and respects optical and thermal safety standards; accelerated ageing shows a lifetime of at least 2 years. POLYRETINA represents significant progress towards the improvement of both visual acuity and visual field with the same device, a current challenging issue in the field.
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