Could a Hacker Change What a Patient Sees? with Frederik Ceyssens | Ep 77

Chapters

1. 0:00what your device is, from my understanding, it's like a pair of
2. 7:14It was quite a journey since then, right?
3. 14:03This will be actually done by a research group in Spain that
4. 22:23I mean, you go from completely blind to having some visual stimulation
5. 30:36And I think you mentioned you've been working on this for like
6. 37:33But of course if they don't move their eyes in the right
7. 45:41So it's certainly a point to

Christian: what your device is, from my understanding, it's like a pair of glasses that have a camera connected to an implant in the back of your head. The stimulus from the camera stimulates the brain and that is what allows a person to see. Frederik: Cybersecurity, this is obviously important as this is wireless communication between the several different parts of the device. A malignant attacker might, for example, also turn the stimulation up to dangerous levels for example. Christian: the lifespan of like 15, 20 years. That's one of the cybersecurity challenges with implantables or neurostimulators is, you know, you've got some sort of encryption technology. It's highly probable that that encryption technology is going to be broken or compromised. The encryption no longer is valid. Christian: Hi, welcome back to another episode of the Med Device Cyber Podcast. Today we have a guest Frederik Ceyssens and he has a cool invention or technology that can restore vision uh for people that have blindness. So we're up for an exciting episode today. So before we get started, um, I met Frederik I think the first time in Portugal, like a couple of years ago at an event. And uh, that was in 2024, I believe. And now here we are in 2026. So you've made quite a bit of progress on your device since then. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background and uh your company and what the technology involves. Frederik: Great to be here, Christian. Thanks for inviting me. Uh, basically uh, I have been a researcher in neural implants for about 10 years at the University of Leuven in Belgium. And I was working with a neurosurgeon and this guy was interested in recording in cavities that you get in the brain after the tumor has been resected or after there has had been a major hemorrhage. Typically, then there is some kind of permanent cavity that formed uh which is of course kind of a diseased part of the tissue, and he wanted to try to record signals in that cavity to uh see if he could base therapies on them or at least learn something scientifically. Um and for that I actually developed our first very ultra flexible microelectrode arrays. So these things basically were kind of umbrella-shaped and I could nicely fit to the form of any cavity that you would have uh somewhere in the brain. We had some tests on on on rats. There were some papers published but it wasn't too spectacular so we didn't really have like a major breakthrough there. But then at the end of the project with my background in in microtechnology and also a bit of medicine as well, um, I was really wondering if we couldn't use it for another application. And I really came to this field of visual prosthesis. Because um something similar in in uh cochlear implants was already working pretty well and and people that are now completely deaf can often understand conversations again, can lead a normal life after getting a cochlear implant. But something similar for blind people hadn't been uh produced yet. So people tried in the past, like there was for example the Orion device, the there was the Argus device, there was a German company called um by uh called, what was it called again? Um anyway, it was a German company that uh uh also built a retinal implant. But the performance was never good enough. Uh and the idea that that we had was why not try to go go directly into the visual cortex of the brain, not not uh try to place implants in in in the remaining parts of the eye like the the retina where everything is extremely close together and where it's very difficult to selectively uh stimulate the nerves. In the visual cortex of the brain, everything is much more spread out and it looked like a much, a much better target for for a neurostimulation-based therapy for blindness. Though of course, it's also more invasive. It it's of course very understandable that people had aimed for implanting a device in the eye of blind people before because it's much more accessible and it's uh uh there's going to be uh an easier surgery involved. But okay, up to now, it hasn't been shown to work uh good enough. The the the brain was really uh promising and that's why we we we aimed for that and we started a company to develop this device five years ago. It was quite a journey since then, right? So we uh, we started with almost nothing. So we uh, it was too early for the university to support it, so they didn't really want us to be a spin-off company of the university. And I had also no IP. And on the other hand, I tried to I thought actually at that point that we already had the technology more or less in hand, but that turned out not to be the case. So we had to really do a lot of additional R&D. Luckily, aided by collaborations with research labs that for example could do uh monkey testing uh with our devices and a very quick feedback cycle. So we really could build devices, test them in a couple of months, uh and and and go back to the lab, try to improve things, and so on. And and this went on for several years up so to actually produce the technology that we have now, which is really a very stable uh brain electrode uh technology that that that can be scaled to thousands of electrodes. That's actually proven to be uh to be safe in these long-term monkey studies that I was already mentioning. And that's that's all also uh shown to be effective in exciting visual stimuli in the brain because these monkeys actually get trained to move their eyes towards targets and they can now do this to real targets on the screen but also to like virtual targets that are just projected in their brain using our implant. So it's looking, it's looking good so far. It really looks like we can actually build a much better visual prosthesis than people have built in the past based on uh this technology. Um and then uh, yeah, now it's really the the second part of the challenge coming, right? We we we don't have a full scale device yet. We just have these electrodes. Uh, we have some prototype electronics, but this is really not at the not at the level that you need to be uh say, get to be certified as a medical device. There's another development cycle needed for that. And there's also some still some other technical issues to solve. Less fundamental but still of course they need to be solved like uh the hermetic packaging of the electronics, uh the the uh miniaturization of of the of the electronics and so on. So we we basically are now really in this phase where we are moving out of this say research phase and really into the into uh the phase that maybe most uh med tech companies already start with. So basically actually building a device built based on previous previous results. And that's also why why I met you, right? We I was exploring this LSI conference to uh to find additional investors, but also to talk with people that are professionals in this field and that that are really uh knowledgeable about how to build safe electronics, how to build things that actually pass a regulatory review and and so on. Um, and this, well, this process has been going on ever since. Christian: I see, so you just got four million euros of funding uh like a few weeks ago? Frederik: Yeah, that was that was uh really nice milestone. So we uh when when we just met at LSI, I I was just started started to talk to the first uh investors. Up to that point, we had been funded by uh family offices, uh from Belgium, and also by um by by grants, a government grant, both a European grant at that point and uh and a national grant. Um, and now we we we've been able to take the next step, which which will uh allow us to afford uh say the device development at a professional level, right? So we will uh outsource the IC development so we will get a uh dedicated IC developed under ISO 13485 quality system. Um we we will also um be able to to to get the packaging developed and also to do uh an additional series of of of tests including actually a first proof of concept on a on a human volunteer. That's also very uh uh very nice. So we we we will very soon have actual patient feedback, not with a full-scale device yet, but basically with an enlarged version of what we already tried on the in in earlier monkey tests, so a device with where there is in this case about 300 electrodes going into the visual cortex which is then wired to a small connector that can connect them to external electronics. And this way we really want to have a hands-on access to to what's happening and get patient feedback as quickly as possible, even before the uh full scale device has been has been uh finalized and approved for for clinical testing. This will be actually done by a research group in Spain that has already experience with similar experiments on on uh on blind volunteers, but then with these uh more research-grade Utah arrays uh that only cover a very small portion of the uh visual cortex. With with our flexible electrodes, we will basically be able to cover about uh 20 times more area. And, of course, what we want to show is that it's actually about 20 times better then. If that's the case, we uh we know that we can scale it further and that um uh that we will be able to restore useful vision with a with our full scale device, which should also be ready in a few years. Christian: And for the listeners that may not be familiar with what your device is, uh from my understanding it's like a pair of glasses that have a camera that's connected to an implant in the back in the back of your head, which the the stimulus from the camera stimulates the brain and that is what allows a person to see. Frederik: Yes. Christian: That's... Frederik: That's... Christian: Okay. It sounds kind of like science fiction. I remember in 2015 I attended a TED conference and they were talking about the exact same thing that you're developing, like being the future where we have external devices like your camera that stimulate the brain. So even if you lose your vision or your hearing, you've got this external microphone for your hearing and if you stimulate the right part of the brain then you can actually hear or see which is very, it sounds very like futuristic but it's it's here now, right? Frederik: Yeah, and it's basically because all nerve uh what what you perceive uh what comes into your senses is basically just a series of electrical pulses and just by growing up you you've you've you've taught yourself what this images and what are what are sounds and of course there is a whole specialized brain circuit for everything. It's not it it it will just it's something that you had to learn completely independently. Everybody more or less hears or sees the same. But the basic principle is indeed that that that you can replace the say source of these pulses uh be it your eyes or your ears by just an external series of electrodes that stimulate the same nerves. If if these nerves are still good, you will be able to to generate some some vision and some some hearing and and some other senses as well. Uh obviously I'm not claiming that this will be natural uh vision that is that will be as good as as natural vision, uh like an image equivalent to a few thousand pixels is what we will be able to achieve which is of course far from the tens of megapixel equivalent that your eyes can actually see. But if you downscale a picture to a few thousand pixels, you you can still uh distinguish some the the most the most important parts of of the picture. And with some with some additional uh aids like for example a zoom mode or uh some additional image recognition, you can you will be able to navigate much better in life as a as a blind person, to even be able to read large letters, to see where people are standing, activating a zoom mode, you will be able to recognize faces by actually seeing them, not just uh not just by somebody telling you or some AI telling you what it is but really by by just distinguishing the most prominent features. So it will really be a large improvement for blind people even though it's not going to be uh natural vision at all. So we we we really hope to uh basically demonstrate this as quickly as possible and uh and make another large step to bring this to the market. Christian: And will the technology be, I don't know too much about this stuff, but will it be like in color? Um will you be able to distinguish colors? Frederik: Well, there have been there have been experiments on blind volunteers before. So people have already volunteered to undergo the implantation of of up to 100 electrodes. And there were already some important conclusions from this. So right so you can actually excite so the seeing of simple shapes and uh dots of light, that can be combined to more complex shapes. That's that's been proven but basically color vision and depth perception and and the and distinguishing fine features, these are all basically interwoven in the same circus but that there is just so finely well so finely ingrained that it's impossible with current technology to uh access them individually. What we basically can do is in every cortical column which is basically a 500 by 500 micrometer wide block of neurons that are forming the visual system and more or less every cortical column is responsible for every for a specific part of the field of view. So every cortical column we can put one electrode to selectively stimulate that column which will generate some kind of flash of light which can form a crude image, but all these thousands of neurons inside this column cannot be addressed individually yet. So what so you will be able to see a crude image but not uh not the fine details, not the colors, not the depth perception. That's something we really can't promise people. But of course if you're completely blind and and I've talked to more than a hundred blind people so far since since we had some publicity since we were in the media, we get we get emails every day that are very encouraging. We really know that that this is already going to be a a huge improvement in the life of people that are completely blind. Christian: Yeah, 100%. I mean you go from completely blind to having some visual stimulation. It may not be perfect, but it's definitely better than what you had before. And it sounds like the technology will continue to evolve where color at some point may be able to be added and the depth and other things that you mentioned. Frederik: Yeah, yes, on the side we're also still solving cancer, but that's for another... That's for another day. Christian: Okay! Christian was very nice to get to chat with you again. Frederik: I'm I'm pretty sure we'll see each other soon. Uh I think you'll also go to to Barcelona, right? Or or you're... Christian: Yeah, I'll be in Barcelona. Frederik: And uh, and uh we can take it from there. All right. Have a great day, guys. Christian: Yeah, thanks everyone for tuning in. I hope you found this episode interesting and we'll see you on the next one. And thanks again Frederik.