Abstract
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) are common diseases in eyes. They can make the patients blind when they become severe. Nowadays, a lot of research groups are devoted to retinal prosthesis, the goal is to help patients rebuild their visual ability. By interaction between retinal neurons and electro-stimulations which are released by microelectrode array, the artificial visual signals can be created, transmission and then let the patients have visual ability again. Although, there is a commercial product in the market, the weakness is that rebuilding visual acuity cannot reach 20/200 (less than 20/200 means the blindness) and the recovery effects are different from people to people. So it means that this product still has a huge space can be improved. The bottle neck is that the signal transmission in the retinal network is not completely clear and the production of color and visual acuity still remains a big issue. Whether the artificial electrical signal can totally replace the normal signal in the retina? The research has proved that the retinal neural network is related to the retinal receptive field, it is hard to give pattern stimulation and record all the reactions of retinal ganglion cells at the same time. Therefore, in this research, MTM system is created to solve the problems above and finds out the best way to give the stimulation effectively. In this research, patch clamp is used to do the retinal experiment in vivo and prove that the MEA flex made by our lab can do the sub-retinal stimulation. The lowest effective stimulation is 1.44mC/cm2. The MTM system is equipped with multi-electrode stimulation and multi-electrode recording. The data are processed by the data analysis and search the cell signals by threshold voltage. The primary experiment is that MTM system can detect the cell signal about 30~40V. After averaging all the cell signals and reduce the noise, the slope feature of the cell signal wave is 0.13V/s.