Visual neuroprosthesis: a non invasive system for stimulating the cortex

This paper describes a complete visual neuroprosthesis wireless system designed to restore useful visual sense to profoundly blind people. This visual neuroprosthesis performs intracortical microstimulation through one or more arrays of microelectrodes implanted into the primary visual cortex. The whole system is composed by a primary unit located outside the body and a secondary unit, implanted inside the body. The primary unit comprises a neuromorphic encoder, a forward transmitter, and a backward receiver. The developed neuromorphic encoder generates the spikes to stimulate the cortex by approximating the spatio-temporal receptive fields characteristic response of ganglion cells. Power and stimuli information are carried to inside the cranium by means of a low-coupling transformer, which establishes a wireless inductive link between the two units. The secondary unit comprises a forward receiver, microelectrode stimulation circuitry and a backward transmitter that is used to monitor the implant. Address event representation is used for communicating spike events. Data is modulated with binary frequency-shift keying and differential binary phase-shift keying in the forward and in the backward directions, respectively. A prototype of the proposed system was developed and tested. Experimental results show that the spikes to stimulate the visual cortex are accurately generated and that the efficiency of the inductive link is relatively high, about 28% in average for 1 cm intercoil distance providing a power of about 50 milliwatts to the secondary implanted unit. Application specific integrated circuits were designed for this secondary unit, showing that, with current technology, it is possible to implement such a unit, respecting the power constraints.