CLEVELAND—Cleveland Clinic
announced its eighth annual list of Top 10 Medical Innovations that will
have a major impact on improving patient care within the next year.
First on the list this year is the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System by
Second Sight. Often referred to as the “early stage bionic eye,” it is
the first and only approved device intended to restore some functional
vision from people suffering from blindness.
Second Sight exhibited Argus
II in Vision Monday’s Eye2 Zone, a special showcase for new vision
technologies at Vision Expo West.
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The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System from Second Sight is the first and only approved device intended to restore some functional vision from people suffering from blindness. |
The list of breakthrough
devices and therapies was selected by a panel of Cleveland Clinic
physicians and scientists and announced during Cleveland Clinic’s 2013
Medical Innovation Summit. Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit
multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and
hospital care with research and education.
Among the other devices on the
Cleveland Clinic’s 2014 List of Top 10 Medical Innovations are
genomic-guided tumor diagnostics, a new anesthesia management system and
a new bio marker screener for heart disease.
The Argus II device is
surgically implanted in and on the eye and is designed to bypass the
damaged photoreceptors altogether. Glasses with a built-in camera
capture a scene which is processed and transformed before being
transmitted wirelessly to the antenna in the implant. This process of
transmitting visual information along the optic nerve to the brain
creates the perception of patterns of light which patients can learn to
interpret as visual patterns.
After two decades of
development and testing and more than $200 million in funding, the Food
and Drug Administration approved an early-stage bionic eye for severe
retinitis pigmentosa (RP) in 2013 that combined a surgically implanted
60-electrode retinal prosthesis, video-camera-enabled glasses and a
video processing unit. ■