The intervention, a pioneer in this country, was carried out in the specialized hospital Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London, as part of a European clinical trial.
An 88-year-old British woman who had lost sight in her left eye has become the first patient in the UK to detect signals in that eye using a revolutionary new bionic chip.
The woman, mother of seven children and grandmother of eight grandchildren, suffer from geographic atrophy, the most common form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and a condition that affects more than five million people worldwide.
The intervention, a pioneer in this country, was carried out in the specialized hospital Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London, as part of a European clinical trial.
In a statement released to the national media, the woman, a native of the Dagenham neighborhood in the British capital, said she was confident that the implant would allow her to return to activities that she loved, such as “gardening, bowling and watercolor painting”.
“I am delighted to be the first to have this implant, excited with the possibility of enjoying my hobbies again and I really hope that many others will also benefit from this”, said the patient.
How does the implant work?
This implant works by surgical insertion of a 2-millimeter microchip into the center of the patient’s retina, who has to put on special glasses that contain a video camera linked to a small computer that is, in turn, attached to a band on the waist.
The chip captures the image provided by the glasses and transmits it to the computerr which, through the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, then processes the information and guides the focus of the glasses.
Finally, the glasses project the image as an infrared beam through the eye onto the chip, which transforms it into an electrical signal that travels back through the cells of the retina, to the brain. This in turn, interprets that signal as if it were natural vision.
The research is supported by the NIHR Biomedical Research Center of the aforementioned London hospital, the NHS and the Institute of Ophthalmology at University College London and the device used in the operation, Prima System, was developed by the firm Pixium Vision, in France.
In the note disclosed to the media, the specialist Mahi Mugit, of the aforementioned London medical center, considered that this device offers “hope to restore vision to people suffering from vision loss due to AMD“.