Restoring sight, advances in fertility treatments and better visibility for pil...( WASHINGTON Aug. 23 V Frontiers in ...)

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 V Frontiers in Optics 2007 (FiO), the 91st Annual Meeting of the Optical Society of America, will be held from Sept. 16-20 in San Jose, Calif., alongside Laser Science XXIII, the annual meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Laser Science.

Reporters interested in obtaining a badge to attend the meeting should contact Colleen Morrison at 202.416.1437, cmorri@osa.org.

FiO RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Following are a few of the many technical highlights to be discussed at the meeting:

• Restoring Sight, One Pixel at a Time
• Near-Infrared LIDAR Helps Pilots
• Better, Stronger, Faster: High-Throughput Sperm Sorting
• Detecting Malaria with Light
• Gigantic Photoresponse Can Speed Up Optical Switches for Faster Internet Speeds
• Explaining a 21st Century Version of Young's Experiment

Restoring Sight, One Pixel at a Time

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) are developing a tiny camera for prosthetic systems that can be implanted directly into the human eye and connected to the retina, the part of the eye that converts visual information into electric signals that travel to the brain. Such an implantable camera would represent an important milestone in the ultimate goal of providing limited vision to those rendered blind by certain diseases, via a fully implantable retinal prosthetic device.

In both retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration V two of the most common causes of vision loss V the photoreceptor layer of the retina is destroyed, but the inner layers remain largely intact, still capable of responding to incoming signals and transmitting output signals to the brain's visual cortex via the optic nerve. The discovery several years ago that direct electrical stimulation of retinal nerve cells in blind test subjects produced some sense of vision led to the developm
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