Xing Chen won 3 grants for her research to better understand and restore sight

In the past five months, Xing Chen, assistant professor of ophthalmology in the School of Medicine, has been recognized several times for her cutting-edge work on brain-computer interfaces to better understand vision and, ultimately, return some of that vision to those who have lost it.

Chen, who has a secondary appointment in the Swanson School of Engineering Department of Bioengineering, studies how the brain processes visual information coming in from the outside world and how we in turn make sense of it. She is also developing new ways to stimulate the visual processing area of the brain using electricity, a research path headed toward developing new ways to restore people’s sight.

She has recently won three grants, including an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and the Weigand Entrepreneurial Research Award. Just this year, Phosphoenix, the startup company she co-founded with a former supervisor and a computer hardware industry collaborator, received a European Innovation Council (EIC) Transition Grant for 2.5 million euros.

Both the Weigand award from the Eye and Ear Foundation of Pittsburgh, and the EIC Transition Grant recognize her work as an entrepreneur.

Ultimately, Chen hopes to develop a novel brain implant that can stimulate areas of the brain in order to help people with impaired vision “see” their surroundings.

This is possible because of how brain processes images: The visual cortex contains what is essentially a pixelated map, made of neurons, that represents your field of vision. Each area of your field of vision corresponds to a group of cells on that map. Stimulate certain cells with an electrode and you will perceive it as a dot of light, called a phosphene, in a particular spot in your field of vision.

“If you have a lot of electrodes, you can, in theory, generate a lot of phosphenes,” Chen said. “And if you pick a certain configuration of electrodes to stimulate, then you could draw very, very simple shapes or outlines of objects.”

The implant Chen and her team are developing will be able to record and stimulate a large number of electrodes, providing higher precision than any therapeutic currently on the market. It may also have potential for conditions where brain stimulation shows promise, such as movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease, and potentially even psychiatric disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression.