Early design considerations for a thalamic visual prosthesis to treat blindness resulting from glaucoma

Abstract

Development of visual prostheses for human cortex or retina has gained interest in recent years. However, a visual prosthesis for the thalamic region targeting the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) would have many advantages. This paper proposes such a deep brain visual prosthesis that can harness the capacity of the residual central visual neurons following loss of retinal ganglion cells in glaucoma. We believe that such a prosthesis can restore visual percepts, substituting an engineered prosthetic for the image capture and early visual processing properties of the LGN neurons that we propose to drive artificially.