Case Study: Doheny Eye Institute achieves rapid development of a next-generation retinal prosthesis with MathWorks

Doheny Eye Institute Develops Next-Generation Retinal Prosthesis

Doheny Eye Institute is developing a next‑generation retinal prosthesis to restore vision for patients with retinitis pigmentosa and needed a flexible, real‑time image‑processing platform that could be rapidly prototyped and deployed to low‑power DSP hardware. Working with MathWorks tools, the team had to support rapid algorithm iteration, ensure safety for patient testing, and target a Texas Instruments DSP in a portable system while improving resolution and perceptual testing.

MathWorks provided MATLAB, Simulink, Computer Vision System Toolbox, Simulink Coder and Embedded Coder (among other toolboxes) to develop, simulate, automatically generate C code, and deploy algorithms to a TI DM642 DSP. Using MathWorks tools reduced development time from months to weeks (updates can be deployed to the DSP in hours), streamlined DSP deployment, and improved patient testing; these advances support increasing image resolution (from 16 to 60 pixels for the next generation) and faster optimization of stimulation parameters.

Doheny Eye Institute

James Weiland

Associate Professor