Argus II seems to keep its promises. Sandra Cassell, a 29-year-old Canadian with retinal dystrophy, has regained visual perception thanks to this prosthesis, already implanted in 18 patients in France since the installation of the “innovation package“three years ago. Nicknamed” the bionic eye “and marketed by the company Second Sight, it helps people with degenerative diseases of the retina distinguish contours and recognize shapes.
“A new hope”
The young Canadian, mother of three children, was selected last May to benefit from this innovation, established for the first time in Quebec. And for good reason: five years after the diagnosis of her disease, she had almost become blind. The operation lasted nearly four hours and was performed by the medical team at the University Center for Ophthalmology of the University of Montreal, at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital (Quebec). The prosthesis, which takes the appearance of a camera attached to eyeglasses, was thus able to be implanted in the young woman. It allows him to regain visual perception because the images captured by the camera are transformed into electrical pulses and transmitted to a chip grafted on the retina.
This intervention allowed Sandra Cassell to perform the simple daily tasks again. “I am now able to see my children, or even the pedestrian in the street. Able to sort my clothes, to determine the height of things”, she tells Radio Canada. An innovation which represents “a new hope for all the people who have become blind as a result of a degenerative disease of the retina”, explains Isabelle Hardy, medical chief of the CUO at BFMTV.
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