Dr. Jiayi Zhang received her B. Sc. Degree from Hong Kong Baptist University and Ph.D. degree from Brown University. She was a Brown-Coxe postdoctoral fellow in Yale University and joined Institutes of Brain Science at Fudan University in 2012. Her recent work focused on the decoding and restoration of vision. Her work was published in journals including Nature Biomedical Engineering, Neuron, Advanced Materials and Nature Communications. She received the Young Innovative Woman Award in Shanghai in 2020. She serves as the Vice chairman of the Neurotechnology Panel, Chinese Neuroscience Society (CNS). She is on the editorial board of Progress in Retina and Eye Research.
Title: Image-forming vision restoration and decoding
Abstract:
photoreceptors in the retina are fundamental units of light perception and play a key role in vision, the most important sense for human being, by turning light signals into electrical activities of these cells. Vision loss could be induced in some retinal diseases simply by damage/degeneration of photoreceptors, even though the neural circuitries in the rest parts of the retina and visual centers remain functional. Photoreceptor diseases are exemplified by Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP, 370,000 patients in China) and Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD, 30,000,000 patients in China).
In experimental RP mice model, she succeeded in restoring some visual functions, as demonstrated by a variety of electrophysiological and behavioral tests, by implanting titania nanowire arrays as artificial photoreceptors. These studies, designed and conducted through weaving technologies and concepts from physical and biological sciences, achieving a spatial resolution of 77.5 µm and a temporal resolution of 3.92 Hz. In photoreceptor-damaged monkeys, the arrays, which were implanted and remained stable for 54 weeks, allowed for the detection of a 10-μW mm-2 beam of light. These artificial photoreceptors are now being tested in human clinical trials, with several lines of promising evidence indicating partial restoration of blind person’s vision.
The talk will also touch upon visual information decoding in the visual cortex.