人工视觉辅助系统：现状与展望

通过视觉获取图像信息是人类学习和生活的重要功能，失明则会显著降低其生活质量. 因视网膜色素变性、青光眼和黄斑变性等疾病而造成后天失明者，以及由意外事故、战争等造成眼部创伤者，有可能通过人工视觉辅助系统的帮助恢复部分视觉，或者完成复杂的生活任务. 一些盲症患者视觉通路的神经传导剩余部分依然有功能，因此可以借助电极阵列刺激视神经向大脑传递视觉信息，也可在大脑视觉皮层贴敷电极阵列的方法输入视觉信息. 此外，还能借助体外装置，如通过人工智能将视觉转换成语音指令、触觉阵列编码等，帮助盲症患者获得环境信息. 本文综述各类人工视觉辅助系统的现状，展望其发展趋势，并提出了新的植入器件与随身体外装置的新设想.

Artificial Vision-aid Systems: Current Status and Future Trend

Vision plays an important role in living and learning for human, and its formation includes three processes: retinal photoelectric conversion, optic nerve transmission, and visual cortex perception. According to statistics, there are more than 450 million people with various vision problems in the world. Visual impairment like blindness will significantly reduce the quality of human life. Visually impaired patients usually have no or weak vision due to a problem in one of the processes, which provides possibilities to recover part of the vision of with the help of artificial visual aid systems for most visually impaired patients. This article reviews the development status, limitations and outlooks of state-of-the-art various artificial visual aid systems. To date, there are three kinds of visual aid systems for different vision impairment situations. For patients with retinopathy or lesions in lens, vitreous, cornea, etc., the remaining part of the visual pathway is still functional, so the electrode array or photoelectric array can be implanted into the retinal area, and plays a role in retina to generate electric signals to stimulate the optic nerve, which transmits electrical signals with visual information to the brain. For visually impaired patients whose visual cortex is functional normally, the electrode array can also be applied to the brain''s visual cortex to input electrical signals with visual information directly. In addition, external devices using artificial intelligence to convert vision into voice commands, tactile array coding, etc., can help blind patients obtain environmental information. The implantable visual aid systems mainly face the risk of biological rejection and infection, and their resolution of vision restoration is limited by the electrode size. More complete visual aid electronic devices and systems that can be worn or implanted need to be developed to benefit a large number of patients with visual dysfunction. As a result, here new ideas for implanting devices and extracorporeal aid system are proposed to provide some valuable references for this field.