For a man whose view of the world has slowly faded to black over 30 years, a device that allows him to see flashes of light has enkindled his hope of one day gazing upon his grandson’s face.
A career electrician who grew up in Greece and traveled to the US as a young man, Elias Konstantopoulos first noticed his vision getting poorer when at age 43 he absentmindedly tried on a relative’s eyeglasses and found he could see more clearly with them than without.
Soon after, he visited a doctor who tested his sight and discovered he was no longer able to see his outstretched arms from the corners of his eyes. His peripheral vision was deteriorating.
Photo: AFP
He was diagnosed with an incurable condition known as retinitis pigmentosa. A leading form of hereditary blindness, the disease gradually eats away at the retina’s rods and cones, which are the photoreceptors that help people see light and identify color and detail.
About 10 years later, he could no longer see well enough to keep working.
“You lose your sight, you pretty much lose everything,” said Konstantopoulos, who is now 72 and lost his final bit of vision about five years ago.
When his doctor asked in 2009 if he would like to join a three-year trial of a futuristic technology involving an electrode array in his eye and a wireless camera mounted on a pair of glasses, Konstantopoulos was eager to take part.
Now, every morning he puts on the glasses, straps a wireless device to his waist and stands by the window or out in the yard waiting to hear the sound of a car approaching. When it passes, he says he can see a block of light go by.
He can also distinguish light-colored objects against dark backgrounds and he can orient himself in a room by being able to see where there is an open window or door letting the sun in from outside.
The device, known as the Argus II, is made by a California company called Second Sight. It was recently approved for use in Europe and in the US it has given a handful of test patients like Konstantopoulos cause for optimism.
“Without the system, I can’t see anything. With the system, it’s some kind of hope. Something is there,” he said. “Later on, who knows with technology what it can do? Everything comes little by little.”
The device is similar to cochlear implants that have allowed hundreds of thousands of deaf people to hear again and it is part of a growing field known as neuromodulation, or the science that helps people regain lost abilities such as sight, hearing and movement by stimulating the brain, spinal cord or nerves.
Ear implants work by picking up sound through a tiny microphone, then converting those signals into electrical impulses and sending them to an electrode array implanted in the patient. The electrodes gather the impulses and ship them to the auditory nerve, which hears them as sounds.
The retinal prosthesis follows a similar process. A tiny video camera on the glasses captures images and converts them into electrical signals that are fed to an electrode array that is surgically implanted in the patient’s eye.
The visual signals are sent to the optic nerve and then to the brain, and the patient sees them as flashes of light and blurry shapes.
“It is still a very crude level of vision, but it is the beginning of an improvement,” said Gislin Dagnelie, an ophthalmologist who is working with Konstantopoulos and other blind patients at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “We have to learn how to talk to the retina, basically.”
The implant is unnoticeable. The surgery took about three hours and caused hardly any pain, Konstantopoulos said.
He is gradually improving in his ability to interpret the light flashes and identify them as lines and shapes, the doctor said, but among other patients, the response “varies quite a bit.”
“People who have been blind for a long time probably don’t have as much benefit,” Dagnelie said.
As time goes on, doctors hope that the device could extend to people who suffer from macular degeneration, the primary cause of vision loss among people over 60.
“We hope that 10 to 15 years from now we’ll have something that is quite useful clinically,” the Dutch-born doctor said.
Back in his living room, Konstantopoulos sat in his recliner and scooped up the chubby-cheeked little boy who calls him “Papou.”
“That has been my biggest complaint. I have never seen his face,” he said, cradling the boy on his lap. “I cannot see his face. Yet.”
FRENCH AID: Paris has sent a navy ship and aircraft from Reunion Island with some pollution control equipment, but rough seas are spreading the oil spill The operator of a Japanese bulk carrier which ran aground off Mauritius in the Indian Ocean yesterday apologized for a major oil spill, which officials and environmentalists say is creating an ecological disaster, as police prepared to board the ship. The MV Wakashio, operated by Mitsui OSK Lines, struck the reef on Mauritius’ southeast coast on July 25. “We apologize profusely and deeply for the great trouble we have caused,” Mitsui OSK Lines executive vice president Akihiko Ono said at a news conference in Tokyo. The company would “do everything in their power to resolve the issue,” he said. At least 1,000 tonnes of
They stand as eyesores to most passers-by and potential public health risks to authorities, decaying buildings wrapped in tangles of exposed wire, studded with protruding leaky plastic pipes, vegetation billowing from cracks and terraces where particulates from polluted air have accumulated over time. With skyscrapers and ultramodern developments on every side, some of these “nail houses” are also sitting on land worth millions of dollars in Shenzhen’s inferno of a property market, where new-unit and second-hand home prices rival London. In battles over land and development, the nail house phenomenon has become widespread throughout China over the past two decades, with owners
An Italian alpine resort on Friday remained on high alert over fears that a vast chunk of a glacier on the slopes of the Mont Blanc massif could plummet in high temperatures. “No one gets through! No cars, bikes or pedestrians,” was the message at a checkpoint where an automatic barrier and two guards blocked the small road snaking up into a lush valley below the Planpincieux glacier, near the town of Courmayeur and the Italian-French border. The blockade has largely been greeted with contempt by the locals, one of whom said: “It’s a joke.” The huge ice block measuring around 500,000 cubic
SHOW OF SOLIDARITY: The publisher’s ‘Apple Daily’ newspaper has had to raise the number of copies printed from 70,000 to 550,000 to meet a huge surge in demand They have occupied Hong Kong’s central business district, marched by the hundreds of thousands through the territory’s streets and endured tear gas and pepper spray in pitched battles with riot police. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy supporters are now wielding a new protest weapon: their stock-market trading accounts. To show support for Jimmy Lai (黎智英), the publisher and outspoken government critic who was on Monday arrested under the territory’s new national security legislation, Hong Kongers have been piling into shares of his media company Next Digital. The result: a more than 1,100 percent surge in two days that propelled the stock to a seven-year
RSS