gms | German Medical Science

Artificial Vision 2017

The International Symposium on Visual Prosthetics

01.12. - 02.12.2017, Aachen

Willkommen

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

on behalf of the organizers of the 2017 Artificial Vision Meeting it is my pleasure to welcome you all here in Aachen/Germany. The Aachen Meeting on Artificial Vision was established to provide a platform for researchers to present and to discuss new data. It should also serve as a market place for people to meet, to exchange ideas and to fi nd partners for joint projects.
The meeting covers a broad spectrum of aspects from retinal physiology, technology and microsystems engineering, biophysics and clinical ophthalmology. In this respect the Artificial Vision Projects are best practice examples for interdisciplinary translational research projects.
The development of visual prostheses started early some 60 – 50 years ago in a first phase and was „re-launched“ in a second phase in the mid 90ies. Now we are looking forward to a third phase with emerging new technologies and deeper insights into the pathophysiology of the degenerated visual system. The second phase was extremely exciting because the ideas were transferred to clinical products and today we are able to analyze outcome data of the first and second generation retinal implants. Surely, the results are limited and maybe not within the range we all previously expected. However, there are previously blind patients performing extremely well with these implants. There is still a long and rough road ahead of us to further improve the concepts and the systems. What at least has been shown is that the concept of restoring visual percepts using implantable devices is working and that it is safe. Comparing the technological approach with genetic or cell based approaches it seems more and more evident that the biological approaches need some healthy structures in the retina. In the very advanced and late cases of retinal degeneration where all of the retinal photoreceptors are gone the prosthetic approach seems to be the only possible way.
We all wish that this symposium will be a great meeting for all the participants. We encourage everyone to attend this meeting and to get into contact with other researchers, making new contacts and friends. We are encouraging international networking between the groups and also between the worlds of ”epi-”, ”sub-”, ”supra-”, or cortical, or other approaches. At the end our goal is the same.
We are thankful for the industry for their generous support and also for the DFG for their support of this meeting.
Sincerely,

Peter Walter
RWTH Aachen University
together with Wilfried Mokwa, Frank Müller, and Andreas Offenhäusser

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