Abstract
Purpose :
Retinal prosthesis is designed to help blind peoples restore vision. Based on the implanting site, there are three major approaches that have been adopted, including epiretinal, subretinal, and suprachoroidal prostheses. To decrease the difficulty of surgery and to reduce the demand of power supply, wireless photovoltaic subretinal prostheses have been developed recently. Different from the Prima photovoltaic subretinal prosthesis which uses near infrared light (NIR) as the main signal (Palanker lab at Stanford), our A-Neuron photovoltaic subretinal prosthesis (Wu lab at NCTU) uses visible light as the image source. Although this design has an obvious advantage of using natural light as visual signal, it is not known if visible light would affect the efficiency of the response of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) induced by electrical stimulation via interacting with the remaining light sensitive retina.
Methods :
In the experimental setup, retinal neurons of adult C57BL/6 mice were activated electrically by a multi-electrode array, and light stimulation was provided by LED light. Responses of the RGCs on both electrical and light stimulations were recorded using whole cell current clamp.
Results :
In the results, we found that light stimulation indeed affected RGC responses upon electrical stimulation in the mouse retina. Surprisingly, the response of RGCs were suppressed when the light stimulation leading the electrical stimulation 25-750 ms, and vice versa.
Conclusions :
Our study thus suggests that the remaining light sensitive neural network affects the efficiency of electrical stimulation. Overall, this study provides an insight into improving the efficiency of retinal prosthesis.
This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.