Speakers > Diego Ghezzi

Diego Ghezzi

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Prof. Diego Ghezzi holds the Medtronic Chair in Neuroengineering at the School of Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He received his M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering (2004) and Ph.D. in Bioengineering (2008) from Politecnico di Milano. From 2008 to 2013, he completed his postdoctoral training at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova at the department of Neuroscience and Brain Technologies; where he was promoted to Researcher in 2013. In 2015, he was appointed as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in the EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics.

Neuroprostheses for artificial vision

Implantable neural prostheses are devices exploited to recover impaired or lost functions, such as vision. In this talk, I will present our group’s effort to develop novel visual prostheses. I will cover aspects spanning from materials to manufacturing methods and preclinical validation. In particular, I will focus on wireless solutions for stimulation. A common design constraint in neural implants is the presence of cables connecting the electrode-tissue interface to implantable electronic units. The presence of wires and connectors is a significant disadvantage for neural prostheses. They are weak points often leading to failure, they exert mechanical forces and tractions on the implant and the tissue, and they might lead to post-surgical complications, such as infection. Also, the use of implantable electronic units is another disadvantage due to constraints in power consumption, heat generation, and high risk of failure in a wet environment due to leakage. In neurotechnology, truly wireless electrodes are highly desirable. POLYRETINA is a wireless retinal prosthesis allowing wide-field and high-resolution stimulation of the retina. First, I will describe our recent results related to POLYRETINA testing. Then, I will discuss how materials and solutions adopted for POLYRETINA are now applied to new devices for artificial vision and other applications.