Computer Vision News - October 2022

24 Poster Presentation Ashley Bruce is a recent graduate fromUCSBandaSoftwareEngineer at Veeva. Michael Beyeler is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ashley and Michael spoke to us ahead of their poster presentation about their work exploring the optimal arrangement of electrodes in epiretinal prostheses. Several diseases could result in blindness, including some that slowly attack the retina. For the most part, these are hereditary diseases with no cure. Retinal degeneration leads to sight loss because retinal cells are the first step in the vision process. However, even when that first step is gone, it is still possible to hijack the pathway if everything else works. “Epiretinal prostheses bypass the dead retinal cells by stimulating the next part of the pathway,” Ashley explains. “They stimulate the surviving cells and can produce these phosphenes or flashes of light and, quote-unquote, restore vision.” There are already prostheses that use this pathway, but little research has gone into optimizing the placement of electrodes on the prosthesis . That is where this work comes in, proposing a better way to arrange electrodes on the implant to produce greater phosphene coverage. “Current devices arrange their electrodes on a rectangular grid because it’s compact and easy to fabricate,” Michael tells us. “Some people have looked at where to place the whole implant on the retina. Ashley was the first to ask, what if we moved every individual electrode around based on what we know about how these electrodes produce artificial vision?” However, moving every electrode presents the problem of combinatorial explosion. Even in current devices with only 60 GREEDY OPTIMIZATION OF ELECTRODE ARRANGEMENT FOR EPIRETINAL PROSTHESES Ashley Bruce BEST OF MICCAI