John
S. PEZARIS, Ph.D.
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School
Title: "The
Thalamic Visual Prosthesis Project".
Thursday, December 4th 2014 @ 12:00
Seminar Room 1 [FORTH's
bldg]
ABSTRACT:
The field of visual prosthetics has concentrated primarily on two targets for
stimulation, the retina and the primary visual cortex. The lateral
geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, the relay station between these two areas,
has been largely ignored because of the difficulty of surgical approach.
The development of deep brain stimulation techniques for addressing pathologies
of the midbrain has opened surgical access to the thalamus, and motivates a
reconsideration of targets for visual prosthetics.
With this background, we have performed experiments in an animal model to demonstrate
a proof of concept for a visual prosthesis based on thalamic microstimulation,
followed by an experiment in a computer model to set basic engineering
parameters for a thalamic visual prosthesis, in turn followed by a series of
experiments with sighted humans to assess design performance. In this
presentation we will review the compelling motivation for the thalamic
approach, review the experimental results thus far, and provide a preview of
future work.