For patients who have lost their sight to various eye diseases, artificial retina technology allows them to experience limited vision once more.

The external parts of the artificial retina device include glasses with a mounted camera and a small computer.

The device also includes an electrode implanted onto the patient’s retina. When the camera “sees” an image, the computer is able to translate these into a pattern of neural signals. This pattern is then transmitted to the implanted electrode, and directly stimulates the optic nerve. These signals are then able to be processed by the brain and interpreted as very rudimentary images.

The first artificial retina to be implanted in a patient, known as Argus I, included only sixteen electrodes that stimulated the optic nerve. However, the patient with this implant was still able to tell the differences between light and dark, and could make out basic shapes. The newer version of the technology, Argus II, now includes sixty electrodes. However, it is still limited in that patients can only tell the differences between light and dark areas, and can only see shapes, outlines, and blurs, and not detailed images. Regardless, this is a large improvement over no sight, and patients with the implant are satisfied with simply a partial regain of their vision, and are hopeful that the technology will continue to improve. As of late, a third model of the artificial retina is in development, and will include over 200 electrodes.

Though the project began almost ten years ago, the implant has recently been approved for patients in Europe. The company has not yet submitted approval to the FDA, but hopes to do so by the end of this year.

Second Sight – How is Argus II Designed to Produce Sight?

CBS News HealthPop – First Artificial Retina Approved in Europe

US Department of Energy Office of Science – About the Artificial Retina Project

In almost every major futuristic science-fiction work of the last century, jetpacks and flying cars are seemingly as ubiquitous as today’s oversized SUV’s, lining the closets and garages of every hardworking American.  Understandably, in the year 2011, this has lead many disenchanted Trekkies and purveyors of assorted geek cultures to ask, “Well, scientists, where’s my jetpack?!”  While I commiserate with my fellow fans of Asimov and Adams, several recent innovations have led me to believe that we all might be overlooking just how “futuristic” the time we live in really is.  Accessing Google on the iPhone is certainly as close to the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy as we may ever come.  We have the ability to beam blueprints of intricate plastic objects and now even organs anywhere in the world and literally print them out.  We have computers that can beat us in Jeopardy!  And last but not least, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Brain Driver, the thought-controlled car.  On behalf of scientists everywhere, I accept your apologies, geeks.

The AutoNOMOs Project's semi-autonomous car can be powered by smart phones, tablet computers, and now even your own thoughts.

Brain Driver, a semi-autonomous thought-controlled vehicle, is a research endeavor by the AutoNOMOS project, a division of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Freie Universität Berlin headed by Raul Rojas.  The car itself is fully decked out with 360 degree scanning lasers and cameras.  This allows it to navigate roads, to stay within lines, to avoid pedestrians and other obstructions, and to look super futuristic.  I know, how mundane right?  We’ve all seen that Lexus parallel park itself on TV; this doesn’t impress me.  Except that the team at the AutoNOMOS project isn’t content with stopping here. They have utilized a new consumer EEG technology from Emotiv, called the Epoc, to map distinct thought patterns recorded from the brain onto navigation directions that can be used to control the car.  The Epoc, not the first consumer EEG (Electroencephalography) system of its kind but definitely the most user friendly, uses 16-channels to record electrical patterns in the user’s brain from outside the skull as the user is asked to move a virtual cube on a computer screen to the right, left, forward or backward.  Custom algorithms are then used to map these “thought” patterns, unique to each individual, onto specific navigation commands for the car (forward and backward corresponding to acceleration and deceleration respectively).  As the car approaches an intersection, the system records the thought pattern of the driver and proceeds to turn in the desired direction.

Well, that’s the plan anyway.  While the system does work with good regularity, there is a distinct drawback to the two-second delay between when the electrical patterns are read and when the car actually turns.  It also has the limitation of only being able to discern between four different commands, not exactly enough for normal road navigation.  It also appears that a large swath of the population seems to be what Rojas refers to in an article on Wired.com as “BCI illiterate”, or incapable of using EEG based brain-computer interface technologies.

The Emotiv Epoc EEG headset allows mind reading to become a portable activity.

If vaguely unreliable, thought-controlled cars seem like a bad idea to you, I can certainly see where you are coming from.  It’s undeniable that this isn’t intended to be the ultimate use of this technology.  There are, thankfully, researches looking to apply these very same ideas to more useful and practical means, like motorized wheelchairs.  When applied in this way, this gadget moves beyond the realm of mere novelty item intended to intrigue the masses, into a life changing technology for people who could truly use it.  A thought-controlled wheelchair would allow quadriplegics, and others whose conditions leave them with minimal control of their bodies, to move about their worlds simply with their thoughts.  As far back as 2007, Javier Minguez of the University of Zaragosa gave an interview to Wired.com discussing his group’s work on thought-controlled wheelchairs.  At that time, portable consumer EEG technologies were not available; subjects were literally tethered to oversized desktop computers.  One could see how this might be a problem.  With the advent of the Emotiv Epoc, and the vehicle control technologies developed by the AutoNOMOS project, the hurdles between the current state of this technology and widespread consumer availability now lay exclusively in training people to use the technology, and increasing the number, and complexity of the directions the system can learn.  Australian researchers D.A. Craig and H.T. Nguyen at the University of Technology in Sydney are already hard at work on this problem.  In a clever attempt to map a greater number of more complex commands, these researchers have combined thought pattern mapping for diverse and complex mental exercises with head motion sensors, adding many degrees of freedom to the command interface.  We can only assume that with research on both the EEG and autonomous vehicle fronts moving forward, it won’t be terribly long before thought-controlled wheelchairs are commonplace amongst the American public.  Jetpacks or no jetpacks, the future is here, and I for one am ecstatic about the technological possibilities it promises!

The AutoNOMOs Project

Emotiv- Brain Computer Interface Technology

Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – Videos on TED.com

A wheelchair that reads your mind-Wired.com

Thinking your way through traffic in a brain-controlled car-Autopia-Wired.com

Craig DA, Nguyen HT. “Adaptive EEG Thought Pattern Classifier for Advanced Wheelchair Control.” 2007 Annal International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Vols 1-16 : 2544-2547 2007-PubMed

Instead, I’d like to draw attention to a particular aspect of Isaac Asimov’s writing, of which I can’t help being reminded after reading these reports.  As the father of the term “robotics” and all things relating to it, Asimov dealt with nearly all of the issues relating to artificial intelligence.  A few of his fictional robot characters even developed human-like, self-aware consciousness and creativity.  But the one thing which stands out about these characters was that their consciousness was rarely a design of their creators, but rather a fluke.  Minute variations in the mechanized construction of their positronic brains amounted to  unique, creative minds.

Asimov’s choice to author conscious robots as results of random chance forces us to think about how human consciousness evolved in reality.  It may be that such a consciousness is not strictly required for an organism to dramatically enhance its chances of survival and reproduction. We seem to assume that our superior cognitive abilities grant us an enormous advantage over other species, that the sort of consciousness which makes us self-aware, reflective and creative was the “end result” in a very long line of brain development.  But evolution does not work towards such a specific end.  There are plenty of other species (e.g. viruses) that persist with just as much vigor as us, despite their lack of cognitive powers associated with the forebrain.  Perhaps only a minor, random mutation resulted in a dramatic and permanent change in the brain, a change which ultimately amounted to consciousness.  Who knows what the odds are that such an intelligence evolved, or will evolve again in a computer simulation?  At least we can be reassured that, on a long enough time scale, even the most unlikely event can occur.

In any case, Boston University’s own Isaac Asimov has made many a prediction with his science fiction, and many more can be expected.

“Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence”-Catherine Brahic

Do you ever fear that you are losing your memory?

One hundred years ago, when Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) was even more of a mystery than it is now, amyloid protein aggregates were described as black spots that showed up on brain slices after autopsy. These aggregates, commonly known as plaques, denote the telltale sign that a patient has AD. Until recently, these plaques could only be detected after death, but Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, creator of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, may have a solution.

On July 11th, Dr. Skovronsky will present his latest findings at the international meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu. He has spent the last five years creating a fluorine radioactive dye to be used in positron emission tomography (PET) scans. The results of these PET scans are engineered to be so accurate that they can compete with brain autopsies, the only method currently available to determine whether a patient has AD.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) questioned Dr. Skovronsky about his fluorine-18 dye and whether the results of fluorine-18 PET scans compare to the definitive results of brain autopsies. Dr. Skovronsky recruited thirty-five patients in hospice with ranging levels of memory loss; all of these patients would receive a PET scan and would have their brains autopsied post-mortem. The results of each patient’s PET scan matched his or her autopsy results.

If approved by the FDA, Dr. Skovronsky’s work will lead to an increase in accuracy in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, 20% of patients diagnosed with AD are revealed to not have the disease when an autopsy is performed. With fluorine-18, Dr. Skovronsky has fine-tuned a method to detect amyloid plaques in the brain in a living patient, which is a feat within itself. Previously, the only way one could determine whether a patient had the disease or not was through autopsy – a posthumous procedure. Now, patients could have the chance to receive an accurate diagnosis while they are still alive and earlier in their lives.

In addition to simply detecting plaque, fluorine-18 will also aid in understanding the development of the disease, for plaques were found in patients deemed as healthy when they took memory tests. Currently, people who are not diagnosed with AD earlier in life will not receive treatment until the disease has developed more, and they will likely not receive any preventative medicine. With Dr. Skovronsky’s PET scans, doctors could diagnose the development of the disease earlier and administer preventative measures to slow down the development of the disease. Also, patients who are currently misdiagnosed with AD do not receive the correct treatments that they need for the diseases that are actually causing their memory loss or dementia, like depression.

The Vanishing Mind – Promise Seen for Detection of Alzheimer’s – NYTimes
The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative positron emission tomography core – Alzheimer’s Dement. 2010
In Vivo Imaging of Amyloid Deposition in Alzheimer Disease Using the Radioligand 18F-AV-45 (Flobetapir F 18) – The Journal of Nuclear Medicine