eyesight Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Know the Signs of Stroke – BE FAST

The AHA! Team — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 06:42:32 +0000

Debbe Geiger via Duke Health – Know the Signs of Stroke – BE FAST While stroke is the fifth leading cause of death, few people know the signs. Use the acronym BE FAST to remember the signs of stroke, and what to do if someone near you is experiencing them. BE FAST Reminder of Stroke Signs B – Balance Is the person suddenly having trouble with balance or coordination? E – Eyes Is the person experiencing suddenly blurred or double vision or a sudden loss of vision in one or both eyes without pain? F – Face Drooping Does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile. A- Arm Weakness Is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward? S – Speech Difficulty Is speech slurred, are they unable to speak, or are they hard to understand? Ask the person to repeat a simple sentence like, “The sky is blue.” Is the sentence repeated correctly? T – Time to call 911 If the person shows any of these symptoms, even if the symptoms go away, call 911 and get them to the hospital immediately Source: American Stroke Association To read the original article click here.

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Improving Vision with At-Home Brain Exercises

The AHA! Team — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 08:17:33 +0000

John Jeffay via Israel21c – RevitalVision offers a unique intervention for people with eyesight challenges, treating the brain where images are processed. Doctors told Amit Azulay again and again that she’d never be able to drive because of medical conditions affecting her eyesight. She proved them wrong — using a unique piece of software developed by a startup in Israel that has been clinically proven to improve vision. Despite suffering nystagmus (involuntary eye movements) and albinism, her eyesight became good enough to apply for a license (see her delighted response to the news here). Amit, aged 25, is one of many patients who say the online training exercises have literally changed their lives. RevitalVision offers a unique intervention for people with eyesight challenges. It doesn’t treat the eye. It treats the brain. The eye is the hardware, providing the best optical signal it can. But in many cases, the brain struggles to process that signal. That could be because of medical conditions including diabetes, glaucoma or AMD (age-related macular degeneration). It could be a cataract patient whose hardware has been upgraded (cloudy lenses replaced with clear ones) but whose software (the brain) hasn’t caught up. Or somebody who’s had laser surgery but now has blurry vision resulting from reduced contrast sensitivity and still has to wear glasses. Or somebody with “lazy eye” (amblyopia) whose brain sidelines signals from the eye that doesn’t work as well as the other. Or somebody who’s borderline for wearing glasses and would prefer not to. RevitalVision addresses all these problems, and more, with a structured program that trains the brain to better make sense of the blurry signals it receives. Screams of joy RevitalVision’s program typically involves three half-hour, at-home computer sessions per week for two or three months. Patients are trained via a dedicated app. The result, says Yair Yahav, the company’s CEO, is a measurable improvement in vision of 20% to 25%, equivalent to an extra two or more lines on a standard eye chart or, in many cases, the difference between a driving license and no license. “Some patients come to our premises in Modi’in [central Israel], where we have a team of optometrists,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “About once a week I hear screams of joy from a patient in another room who now has good enough vision to qualify for a driving license. We have people who are literally crying. “They’ve been told their whole life that there’s no way, forget it, you’ll never be able to drive. “Then they come to us and if they’re missing just one or two lines [on the eye chart], that’s the average, we tell them they have an 85% to 90% chance of success.” One patient testimonial is from a woman who couldn’t read the label on her medicine, or see well enough to sign a check. She now can. Another, a graduate student with congenital nystagmus, always had to sit at the front of the class to read the board. Now she can sit anywhere. “It’s really lifechanging for many, many people,” says Yahav. Image processing He explains the science behind what they do. “The quality of the image we see depends both on image capturing and image processing,” he says. “We don’t treat the lens of the eye; we treat the brain by enhancing its ability to process visual information, which results in significant vision improvement.” The brain training is based on a “Gabor patch,” which looks like a grid of blurry black and white stripes on a gray background. It was invented by Dennis Gabor, who was born in Hungary, fled the Holocaust, invented holography, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1971. His seemingly simple image perfectly matches the shape of the receptive fields of neurons, or nerve cells, in the part of the brain that processes visual information. Repeatedly stimulating those neurons improves their performance, just like physical exercise at the gym builds muscle, says Yahav. Shoring up weaknesses RevitalVision uses an algorithm to understand exactly where the weaknesses lie for each patient. In a typical on-screen exercise, the patient sees three images pop up, two of a Gabor patch and one of a blank. They have to click, using their computer’s mouse, to indicate which is which. The exercises get harder and harder, with the Gabor patch appearing less clear or further toward the edge of the patient’s field of vision. All the time, the algorithm is assessing responses and adjusting the images it displays accordingly. “Our software maps the patient’s cortical deficits, neurons that do not respond well. Then the algorithm tailors specific stimulation to match those deficits,” says Yahav. “Once the patient is consistently answering correctly, the software knows that’s the exact threshold, the maximum vision of the patient in this exercise, and moves on to the next one. “We are training the neurons to be more responsive and restoring the basic mechanism of visual processing in the brain,” he says. FDA approved Yahav says RevitalVision has “the only regulated product approved by the FDA with clinical claims to improve vision for a variety of eye diseases and impairments.” Some products approved to treat amblyopia, he says, are not for those over the age of nine. RevitalVision builds on pre-Internet technology developed in Israel, which it acquired from another company. This technology was launched commercially two years ago as a web-based product available by direct purchase or through an eyecare specialist. So far, the company’s product has treated 15,000 patients. “We’ve raised $7 million so far and we’re raising another $6 million. Now we are scaling up,” says Yahav. The company received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority during its product development stage, and is conducting trials at Shamir Medical Center associated with Tel Aviv University. It currently employs six people in Israel, six in India and one in the UK. The potential market is so huge that the biggest challenge right now is to spread the word, says Yahav. For more information, click here. To read the original article click here.

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Morning Exposure to Deep Red Light Improves Declining Eyesight

AHA Publisher — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 08:00:11 +0000

University College London via Newswise – Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study by UCL researchers. Published in Scientific Reports, the study builds on the team’s previous work*, which showed daily three-minute exposure to longwave deep red light ‘switched on’ energy producing mitochondria cells in the human retina, helping boost naturally declining vision. For this latest study, scientists wanted to establish what effect a single three-minute exposure would have, while also using much lower energy levels than their previous studies. Furthermore, building on separate UCL research in flies** that found mitochondria display ‘shifting workloads’ depending on the time of day, the team compared morning exposure to afternoon exposure. In summary, researchers found there was, on average, a 17% improvement in participants’ colour contrast vision when exposed to three minutes of 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light in the morning and the effects of this single exposure lasted for at least a week. However, when the same test was conducted in the afternoon, no improvement was seen. Scientists say the benefits of deep red light, highlighted by the findings, mark a breakthrough for eye health and should lead to affordable home-based eye therapies, helping the millions of people globally with naturally declining vision. Lead author, Professor Glen Jeffery (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology), said: “We demonstrate that one single exposure to long wave deep red light in the morning can significantly improve declining vision, which is a major health and wellbeing issue, affecting millions of people globally. “This simple intervention applied at the population level would significantly impact on quality of life as people age and would likely result in reduced social costs that arise from problems associated with reduced vision.” Naturally Declining Vision and Mitochondria In humans around 40 years old, cells in the eye’s retina begin to age, and the pace of this ageing is caused, in part, when the cell’s mitochondria, whose role is to produce energy (known as ATP) and boost cell function, also start to decline. Mitochondrial density is greatest in the retina’s photoreceptor cells, which have high energy demands. As a result, the retina ages faster than other organs, with a 70% ATP reduction over life, causing a significant decline in photoreceptor function as they lack the energy to perform their normal role. In studying the effects of deep red light in humans, researchers built on their previous findings in mice, bumblebees and fruit flies, which all found significant improvements in the function of the retina’s photoreceptors when their eyes were exposed to 670 nanometre (long wavelength) deep red light. “Mitochondria have specific sensitivities to long wavelength light influencing their performance: longer wavelengths spanning 650 to 900nm improve mitochondrial performance to increase energy production,” said Professor Jeffery. Morning and Afternoon Studies The retina’s photoreceptor population is formed of cones, which mediate colour vision, and rods, which adapt vision in low/dim light. This study focused on cones*** and observed colour contrast sensitivity, along the protan axis (measuring red-green contrast) and the tritan axis (blue-yellow). All the participants were aged between 34 and 70, had no ocular disease, completed a questionnaire regarding eye health prior to testing, and had normal colour vision (cone function). This was assessed using a ‘Chroma Test’: identifying coloured letters that had very low contrast and appeared increasingly blurred, a process called colour contrast. Using a provided LED device all 20 participants (13 female and 7 male) were exposed to three minutes of 670nm deep red light in the morning between 8am and 9am. Their colour vision was then tested again three hours post exposure and 10 of the participants were also tested one week post exposure. On average there was a ‘significant’ 17% improvement in colour vision, which lasted a week in tested participants; in some older participants there was a 20% improvement, also lasting a week. A few months on from the first test (ensuring any positive effects of the deep red light had been ‘washed out’) six (three female, three male) of the 20 participants, carried out the same test in the afternoon, between 12pm to 1pm. When participants then had their colour vision tested again, it showed zero improvement. Professor Jeffery said: “Using a simple LED device once a week, recharges the energy system that has declined in the retina cells, rather like re-charging a battery. “And morning exposure is absolutely key to achieving improvements in declining vision: as we have previously seen in flies, mitochondria have shifting work patterns and do not respond in the same way to light in the afternoon – this study confirms this.” For this study the light energy emitted by the LED torch was just 8mW/cm2, rather than 40mW/cm2, which they had previously used. This has the effect of dimming the light but does not affect the wavelength. While both energy levels are perfectly safe for the human eye, reducing the energy further is an additional benefit. Home-Based Affordable Eye Therapies With a paucity of affordable deep red-light eye-therapies available, Professor Jeffery has been working for no commercial gain with Planet Lighting UK, a small company in Wales and others, with the aim of producing 670nm infra-red eye ware at an affordable cost, in contrast to some other LED devices designed to improve vision available in the US for over $20,000. “The technology is simple and very safe; the energy delivered by 670nm long wave light is not that much greater than that found in natural environmental light,” Professor Jeffery said. “Given its simplicity, I am confident an easy-to-use device can be made available at an affordable cost to the general public. “In the near future, a once a week three-minute exposure to deep red light could be done while making a coffee, or on the commute listening to a podcast, and such a simple addition could transform eye care and vision around the world.” To read the original article click here.

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Want to Ditch Your Glasses After Cataract Surgery? This New Artificial Lens May Help

AHA Publisher — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 08:00:29 +0000

American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) via Newswise – NEW ORLEANS, La. – Cataract surgery is one of the most successful medical procedures performed in the United States, with nearly 4 million Americans choosing to have their cataracts removed every year. While the procedure has a success rate of about 97 percent, it is not uncommon for people to still need glasses after surgery, especially reading glasses. A new study released at AAO 2021, the 125th annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, showed that a new kind of artificial lens allowed over 90 percent of patients to see well enough that they no longer needed glasses. A cataract is the clouding of the eye’s natural clear lens. During cataract surgery, an ophthalmologist surgically removes the cloudy lens and replaces it with an artificial lens called an intraocular lens (IOL). The most common IOL type is a monofocal IOL and it allows people to see well at distance, but it can’t fix presbyopia, that annoying part of aging that slowly robs people of their near vision. Researchers have been working for years to develop a presbyopia correcting IOL that can correct the full range of vision: up close, at arms-length, and far away. While these presbyopia correcting IOLs can correct near or intermediate vision, they don’t effectively correct the full range of vision. This new IOL attempts to change that by combining two presbyopia-correcting IOL technologies, multifocal and extended depth-of-focus, to achieve full vision correction. It’s called the Tecnis Synergy from Johnson & Johnson Vision. The U.S. FDA approved the Tecnis Synergy IOL in May 2021. In the study presented today, researchers in Bakersfield, Calif. and 14 other sites across the U.S. compared visual outcomes in patients who received either a monofocal IOL or the new presbyopia correcting IOL during cataract surgery. Of the 272 patients enrolled in the study, 88 percent of those who received the Tecnis Synergy presbyopia correcting IOL never used glasses compared with just 3 percent in the monofocal IOL group. “My career goal has always been to conquer presbyopia—before it conquers me,” said lead researcher Daniel H. Chang, MD. “This lens is a key addition to our ability to treat presbyopia. The Tecnis Synergy provides the best near vision of any lens I’ve ever used. For patients not wanting glasses, this is the lens I recommend.” To read the original article click here.

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Vision Impairment Is Associated With Mortality

AHA Publisher — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 07:00:08 +0000

Michigan Medicine – University of Michigan via EurekAlert – The global population is aging, and so are their eyes. In fact, the number of people with vision impairment and blindness is expected to more than double over the next 30 years. A meta-analysis in The Lancet Global Health, consisting of 48,000 people from 17 studies, found that those with more severe vision impairment had a higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to those that had normal vision or mild vision impairment. According to the data, the risk of mortality was 29% higher for participants with mild vision impairment, compared to normal vision. The risk increases to 89% among those with severe vision impairment. Importantly, four of five cases of vision impairment can be prevented or corrected. Globally, the leading causes of vision loss and blindness are both avoidable: cataract and the unmet need for glasses. The study’s lead author, Joshua Ehrlich, M.D., M.P.H., sought to better understand the association between visual disabilities and all-cause mortality. The work compliments some of Ehrlich’s recent research, also in The Lancet Global Health Commission on Global Eye Health, that highlighted the impact of late-life vision impairment on health and well-being, including its influence on dementia, depression, and loss of independence. “It’s important these issues are addressed early on because losing your vision affects more than just how you see the world; it affects your experience of the world and your life,” says Ehrlich. “This analysis provides an important opportunity to promote not only health and wellbeing, but also longevity by correcting, rehabilitating, and preventing avoidable vision loss across the globe.” To read the original article click here.

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Dynamic Stimulation of the Visual Cortex Allows Blind and Sighted People to ‘See’ Shapes

AHA Publisher — Fri, 15 May 2020 07:00:21 +0000

Cell Press via EurekAlert – For most adults who lose their vision, blindness results from damage to the eyes or optic nerve while the brain remains intact. For decades, researchers have proposed developing a device that could restore sight by bypassing damaged eyes and delivering visual information from a camera directly to the brain. In a paper publishing in the journal Cell on May 14, a team of investigators at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston report that they are one step closer to this goal. They describe an approach in which implanted electrodes are stimulated in a dynamic sequence, essentially “tracing” shapes on the surface of the visual cortex that participants were able to “see.” “When we used electrical stimulation to dynamically trace letters directly on patients’ brains, they were able to ‘see’ the intended letter shapes and could correctly identify different letters,” senior author Daniel Yoshor says. “They described seeing glowing spots or lines forming the letters, like skywriting.” Previous attempts to stimulate the visual cortex have been less successful. Earlier methods treated each electrode like a pixel in a visual display, stimulating many of them at the same time. Participants could detect spots of light but found it hard to discern visual objects or forms. “Rather than trying to build shapes from multiple spots of light, we traced outlines,” says first author Michael Beauchamp. “Our inspiration for this was the idea of tracing a letter in the palm of someone’s hand.” The investigators tested the approach in four sighted people who had electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor epilepsy and two blind people who had electrodes implanted over their visual cortex as part of a study of a visual cortical prosthetic device. Stimulation of multiple electrodes in sequences produced perceptions of shapes that subjects were able to correctly identify as specific letters. The approach, the researchers say, demonstrates that it could be possible for blind people to regain the ability to detect and recognize visual forms by using technology that inputs visual information directly into the brain, should they wish to. The researchers note, however, that several obstacles must be overcome before this technology could be implemented in clinical practice. “The primary visual cortex, where the electrodes were implanted, contains half a billion neurons. In this study we stimulated only a small fraction of these neurons with a handful of electrodes,” Beauchamp says. “An important next step will be to work with neuroengineers to develop electrode arrays with thousands of electrodes, allowing us to stimulate more precisely. Together with new hardware, improved stimulation algorithms will help realize the dream of delivering useful visual information to blind people.” To read the original article click here.

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Breakthrough in Artificial Biomimetic Sight

AHA Publisher — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 08:00:10 +0000

Dr. Liji Thomas, MD via News-Medical Net – In a new study published in February 2020 in the journal Science Advances, researchers report the development of a nanoscale device that acts like the brain’s visual cortex to directly see things in its path. The scientists created a new superstructure through the use of two nanomaterials in tandem that could help to make a machine that uses AI to simulate a human mind’s function. Researcher Jayan Thomas says, “This is a baby step toward developing neuromorphic computers, that can simultaneously process and memorize information. At some time in the future, this invention may help to make robots that can think like humans.” The big advantage of the current approach is in its saving of energy for processing as well as the time required for computation. Sight Devices, Battles, and Drones Another researcher, Tania Roy, predicted that the new technology might be applied to drones that can fly unaided to remote locations to find people in various dangerous situations. The problem with current drones is, she says, because “These drones need connectivity to remote servers to identify what they scan with their camera eye. Our device makes this drone truly autonomous because it can see just like a human.” With earlier research, scientists succeeded in making a camera that can create an image of what is observed, and then upload it for processing and image recognition to a server. The current device, she says, not only sees the image but also instantly recognizes it. According to the researchers, this could also be extremely valuable for defense applications, such as helping soldiers see better on a battlefield. Another potential advantage is that, according to the co-first author Sonali Das, “Our device can sense, detect and reconstruct an image along with extremely low power consumption, which makes it capable for long-term deployment in field applications.” Neuromorphic Computing Neuromorphic, or brain-inspired, computing was first described by the scientists Carver Mead towards the second half of the 1980s. He conceived of systems with electronic analog circuits that do not use traditional on/off or binary signaling but instead exchange spurts of electrical impulses with intensities that vary with the stimulation. These so-called very-large-scale integration (VLSI) systems thus work like the neurological circuits in the brain. Such a computer contains multiple simple processors (‘neurons’) and memory structures (‘synapses’) that use simple signals to communicate. They are extremely important in and good at computing complex ongoing processes with a small set of simple computational premises. Neuromorphic engineering has been the dream of many scientists who look forward to designing a computer that can process and store data simultaneously to make vision possible, just as the human brain does. Today, even the best computers process data and store their information in separate locations. This affects their performance in terms of computing speed and doesn’t make it possible to offer vision on par with the brain and eyes. Successful Tests The scientists tested out the device in face recognition experiments. These were only meant to be tests to check out how well the neuromorphic computing helped the machine to see objects. Describing these as preliminary, Thomas says they wanted to assess the optoelectronic device. “Since our device mimics vision-related brain cells, facial recognition is one of the most important tests for our neuromorphic building block.” When they showed the device the pictures of four different people, each time the recognition was correctly achieved. The Superstructure The achievement rests squarely upon the ability to grow nanosized perovskite quantum dots that respond to light on graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms. Graphene sheets have a broad spectrum of bandwidths, very high electron mobility, and are an excellent carrier transport, besides outstanding flexibility and stability. However, a fatal flaw is the very low efficiency of charge generation, with only 2% to 3% of incident light being converted to electric charge. The quantum dots are semiconductors in nanocrystalline form, with bandgaps that can be adjusted across the spectrum of visible light, efficient conversion of light energy from one frequency to another, and other attractive attributes. They have poor charge transport properties, however. The current superstructure exploits the strengths of both materials while canceling out their weaknesses. Previous attempts to do this have tried to deposit perovskite thin films on graphene, but the present growth technique is novel in optoelectronics. Here, the pi-electron clouds of the perovskite and graphene elements overlap, ensuring an extremely improved charge transfer. The single-atom thickness of graphene means that the perovskite dots capture the incident light, convert it to electrical charge and transfer this charge straightaway in one seamless flow to the graphene sheet. The whole device is thus a film of about 1/10,000 the thickness of a human hair with the best responsivity and sensitivity in its class of devices. Photonic Synapses and Future Directions One of the study’s two first authors, Basudev Pradhan, says, “Because of the nature of the superstructure, it shows a light-assisted memory effect. This is similar to humans’ vision-related brain cells. The optoelectronic synapses we developed are highly relevant for brain-inspired, neuromorphic computing. This kind of superstructure will definitely lead to new directions in the development of ultrathin optoelectronic devices.” These, therefore, act like photonic synapses, capable of responding to light like a neural network in a way that enables pattern recognition, and therefore the recognition of faces and, in the future, neuromorphic computing. The next step is to continue to refine the device such as making it the base of a system of circuits. To read the original article click here.

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