ECE Seminar: Yueming Li

ECE Seminar: Yueming Li

Title: “Photoacoustic Retinal Prostheses: Toward High-Resolution and Minimally Invasive Vision Restoration"

Abstract: Retinal degenerative disease affects more than 200 million patients worldwide, yet no curative treatment is currently available. Retinal prostheses have been developed to restore vision in blind patients with severe conditions, but the most advanced devices provide neither high spatial resolution nor a wide visual angle. Photoacoustic neuromodulation has recently emerged as a promising neural stimulation approach, offering high spatial resolution, material flexibility to cover a large visual angle, and scalability to high pixel numbers—key features desired in retinal prostheses.

In this talk, I will present our recent work on a flexible photoacoustic retinal implant. This device generates an ultrasound field with 56 µm spatial resolution, enabling precise stimulation of mechanosensitive retinal cells. It robustly and locally modulated retinal ganglion cell activity in both wild-type and degenerated ex vivo rat retinae and successfully activated downstream visual pathways in vivo, with response amplitudes comparable to visible light. Our ongoing development of an injectable photoacoustic hydrogel, designed to reduce surgical risks for elderly patients, will also be discussed. Together, these studies highlight photoacoustic as a highly promising strategy for next-generation retinal prostheses to restore vision.

Bio: Yueming Li received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University in 2023. She is currently a Research Scientist in Professor Chen Yang’s group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. Her research focuses on the development of photoacoustic neuromodulation devices for both retinal prostheses and brain modulation. Her work has been published in Light: Science & Applications and Science Advances.