Laser driven optical prosthesis (LASDOP) -Pluridisciplinary project for the development of a retina stimulation

This paper presents a pluridisciplinary project, aiming to develop a retinal stimulation, which results of the meeting of researchers from various backgrounds (ophthalmologists, biologists, physicists, re-educators ...). The keynote of the project is the conception of a model known as artificial vision, which we prefer to refer as retina nerve stimulator to give patients a new vision capability. We decided to develop a epi-retinal stimulation, since this choice could benefit to patients suffering from photoreceptor diseases such as Age Related Macular Degeneration (ARMD) or retinitis pigmentosa (RP). In France, it is estimated that 60000 blind people are concerned. The recovery of a deficient visual function would consist at first glance to restore preferentially the central visual acuity. In fact, clinical blindness studies show that the first need of such patients is the recovery of the peripheral visual field in order to recover some mobility autonomy.The effort of all the pluridisciplinary research teams involved in the project would allow to fully validate the stimulation technique and would allow to start a second step dealing with the encoding of pertinent information from image sequences and the study of related phosphene mechanisms.