Vision Researcher Xing Chen, PhD, and Team Receive Blackrock Neurotech Grant to Explore Thalamus Stimulation for Assistive Vision

Xing Chen, PhD, assistant professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and her colleagues, including collaborator, James Herman, PhD, have received a substantial grant from Blackrock Neurotech to explore a novel approach to brain stimulation for people with blindness.

Dr. Chen’s lab specializes in visual neuroscience and develops implantable devices that record from and stimulate the brain. Their research centers on how electrical stimulation can evoke visual perceptions and ultimately produce assistive vision in people with blindness.

The grant from Blackrock Neurotech, which totals $740,000 over one year, supports the Chen laboratory’s project titled “Generation of Visual Percepts via Thalamic Microstimulation.” Dr. Chen and her colleagues are one of only three teams in the world studying this approach.

“Most of the research in this field has centered upon stimulation of the visual cortex, a large area at the back of the brain that receives and processes visual information,” explains Dr. Chen, who earned her doctorate in Visual Neuroscience from Newcastle University in England and completed postdoctoral research at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. “In our study, we’ll target a specific area within the thalamus, an area of the brain commonly described as a relay station for sensory information.”

The thalamus is located in the middle of the brain and is divided into specialized areas called nuclei, each of which has a specific function. The Chen team will study neuronal activity within the lateral geniculate nucleus, or LGN, which receives sensory information from the eyes and relays it to other areas of the brain for further processing.

Research has shown that stimulating the visual cortex can produce phosphenes, or artificial dots of light that can help with visual perception. Dr. Chen and her colleagues hypothesize that stimulating the thalamus will produce more uniform vision coverage and may offer better control of color and motion than stimulation of the visual cortex can.

“We’re incredibly grateful to Blackrock Neurotech for their support of our project,” Dr. Chen says. “Grants like these enable us to better understand the visual system and develop better solutions for people with vision loss and blindness.”

Learn more about the work Dr. Chen and her colleagues are undertaking at the Brain-Computer & Vision Laboratory.