Flat microscope created for restoring eyesight

Engineers are working on an innovative flat microscope that can repair eye sight and the hearing tendency of a person.

Rice University in collaboration with Yale University created this prototype of transmitting data directly to a person’s brain. Dubbed as ‘FlatScope’, the flat microscope is placed in the brain in order to decode and trigger neurons on brain’s surface that are modified to be fluorescent when active.

Their main objective of introducing this sample is to offer an alternate way for sight and sound to be conveyed directly to the brain. The engineers wish to balance a person’s loss of hearing or loss of vision by sending digital data to the sections of brain that can process it.

Through monitoring the neurons, the device permits the creation of sensors that can convey audiovisual information to the brain. That will in turn ‘fix’ the impaired or damaged senses like the sound or sight, reports Engadget.

Along with capturing greater detail than the already present brain probes, the microscope goes through deep levels that are adequate to illustrate on how a mind processes sensory input. This, as a result, opens the door to ‘controlling’ the sensory input.

Aiming to produce a high-resolution neural interface, the FlatScope is a part of $65 million effort by federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The team’s initial focus would be on a person’s vision. They will create a software interface and an optical hardware. The optical interface would be responsible for identifying signals from tailored neurons that will turn fluorescent when active.

Engineer Jacob Robinson said, “The inspiration comes from advances in semiconductor manufacturing. We’re able to create extremely dense processors with billions of elements on a chip for the phone in your pocket. So why not apply these advances to neural interfaces?”

The engineers are manufacturing a thin interface that can observe and stimulate millions of neurons in the cortex. Caleb Kemere, one of the researchers exclaimed, “We’re taking an all-optical approach where the microscope might be able to visualize a million neurons. That should get us to the dense layers of cortex where we think most of the computations are actually happening, where the neurons connect to each other.”

According to Deccan Chronicle, another member of the team, Ashok Veeraraghavan stated, “The microscope we’re building captures three-dimensional images, so we’ll be able to see not only the surface but also to a certain depth below. At the moment we don’t know the limit, but we hope we can see 500 microns deep in tissue.”