So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration?

Hair loss, nausea, muscle degeneration.

This is a degeneration of the retina.

I had retinal detachment five years ago.

Next he has to pass a retinal scan.

And yet it's only the retinal information that we get.

Which is why we're keeping his body cold to retard degeneration.

Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information.

Stem cell derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide.

And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output.

So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip.

This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases.

My data indicates that I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness.

In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed.

Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you?

We kind of changed the simple digital camera into a retinal camera, and then every patient gets their teleconsultation with a doctor.

Plus having a plateful of daily greens will dramaticly lower your risk of cataracts and macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the U.S.

And she told me the nurses hadn't mentioned this that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years.

It brings the light into focus at just the right spot, and then you have your retinal nerves and you have two eyes so can see in stereoscopic vision.

Until the only things that you have left are these cells here, the output cells, the ones that send the signals to the brain, but because of all that degeneration they aren't sending any signals anymore.

There are 10 million people in the U.S. and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them.

Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code.