PROJECT: JTC2020: I-See

For the large group of blind patients who cannot profit from a retinal implant, intracortical visual prostheses offer great promise. However, intracortical prostheses have had limited success, mainly because they require strong stimulation currents, which generate only non-specific percepts consisting of large spots of light. Here we address these limitations by exploring a fundamentally different approach: we will target complex response properties of neural populations in areas beyond primary visual cortex to generate more specific percepts and link electrical stimulation patterns in a closed-loop setup to the extensive on-going activity in visual cortex to greatly reduce required stimulation currents. To achieve these goals we will bring together scientists from different fields and complementary experimental methods, supported by a strong backbone in computational and theoretical neuroscience. Research will rely on close collaborations between partners, including mutual data exchange on different levels; data-driven predictive modeling; techniques for multi-site, closed-loop brain stimulation; and sharing of experimental paradigms between the disciplines. Planned work ranges from developing subthreshold stimulation techniques in mice, testing novel stimulation paradigms in non-human primates, evaluating sparse stimulus encoding schemes in humans, up to assessing anatomical & functional constraints on the applicability of an intracortical prosthesis in blind individuals.