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'Beautiful sparkle': Retinal implant helps man see again

ANDERSON, Ind. (AP) - As Heidi Smith entered her parents' house for a visit one recent weekend, she saw her father, Steve Smith, standing at the end of the hall, his futuristic black glasses trained on her.

"When I walked in, he said, 'Heidi, I see you.' Then he said, 'You look like the most beautiful sparkle, and as I get closer to you, you erupt into fireworks,'" she said.

That moment nearly brought her to tears, because baby Heidi's birth was one of the last things Steve Smith saw as his world faded to black about 33 years ago.

After living in the dark for three decades, Smith, who gradually went blind because of retinitis pigmentosa, a condition inherited from his mother, is retraining his brain to see thanks to a revolutionary "bionic eye."

He underwent a six-hour outpatient surgery in August at the University of Michigan's Kellogg Eye Center in Ann Arbor to implant the 60 electrodes that are part of the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System. Kellogg is one of 12 centers in the nation offering the retinal prosthesis, the first FDA-approved retinal implant for people with late-stage retinitis pigmentosa.

Argus II provides retinal stimulation by capturing video through a tiny camera housed at the front of Smith's glasses. The video is sent to a small video processing unit where it is converted into instructions sent back the glasses then transmitted wirelessly to the retinal implant. Small pulses of electricity then bypass damaged visual receptors and stimulate the retina's remaining cells, which send the information by way of the optic nerve to the brain.

"It's amazing to tell you there is a wire going from the electrodes through the edge of my eyeball to a coil that they mounted between the layers of skin in my eyeball. There is no leakage, and it cannot be seen or felt," Smith said.

Most people, Smith said, look something like a Christmas tree. Because he was able to see before, he knows when to use visually loaded words like "sparkle" and "fireworks."

"Everything is an interpretation of light, light impulses," he said.

In fact, he's currently in a phase in which he must retrain his brain to see. He practices a couple of hours a day with the glasses at Landmark Accounts, the company he started 38 years ago, and at home.

But Smith never will be able to see quite like he did when he was young.

"To think about the vision I had, there's no comparison. The vision I used to think was poor, I'd like to have it back now," he said. "It's not like going from the major leagues to the little leagues. It's more like going from the major leagues back to infancy."

So why go through the trouble? Because being blind is dangerous.

"I might get too close to a corner and hit a wall. It happens quite frequently when I'm not thinking things through or there's a surprise," he said. "In time I wouldn't bump into something because I know it's there. But I'm just not there yet because of the learning curve."

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Information from: The Herald Bulletin, http://www.theheraldbulletin.com

In this photo taken Thursday, Nov. 13, 2015, Steve Smith holds the glasses in his office in Anderson, Ind. that he wears that transmit images to a device implanted in his eye that send the information to his optical nerve. The images he sees allow him to see shapes, not what a sighted person would consider clear vision but a big improvement over no sight, said Smith. (Don Knight/The Herald-Bulletin via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT The Associated Press
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