Professor builds sight device
By John Ashley Menzies
Skiff Reporter

Everything around you is dark. You can’t see anything. You’re blind.

Then, imagine a device that’s no larger than a strand of hair that could help someone who had no sight, see. With the use of a micro-engine, an artificial eye could focus and relay images to the brain.

“That’s what the eye does,” said Edward Kolesar, the W.A. Moncrief Professor of engineering at TCU. “What you see is an image formed by the brain.”

Kolesar said he is working on producing a tiny mechanical device that would serve as the set of small muscles that would adjust and focus a synthetic polymer lens. The lens was created by Ron Schachar, an ophthalmology surgeon.

“Sight is so precious. Imagine the feeling a blind person would have if they could see, even if it were just a silhouette,” Kolesar said.

Kolesar said he can compare the performance of his small micro-engines to a Formula-1 race car engine that does about 13,000 revolutions per second, but because it is so much smaller, it can actually move faster.

“They are like tiny V-8 car engines, but are no bigger than the diameter of a human hair,” he said.

These micro-engines are part of Kolesar’s ongoing research to help Schachar develop a prosthetic eye. Schachar developed his synthetic lens as an extension of medical research and played with the idea of creating a “smart eye,” but he was lacking the set of focusing muscles and connectors, he said.

In 1997, Kolesar was working for Lockheed Martin on a different micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) research project that involved moving a laser beam with a huge set of miniature mirrors to target far away objects. Schachar heard about this project, through a mutual colleague, and expressed interest in the technology Kolesar was working on for his project, Kolesar said.

Senior engineering major Joey Jayachandran said he worked on the project with Kolesar. He said the research involved designing the micro-engines, which would be produced in North Carolina and come back to be tested using a specialized microprobe station that allows a human to touch and manipulate these microscopic devices.

Jayachandran said Kolesar taught him in class, and after he visited his research lab, he invited him to help out with this project.

“My roommate, Billy Odom, was already working with Dr. Kolesar, so I knew all about this research,” Jayachandran said. “I really like it. You put the things you learn in class to practical use, and you see the results first hand.”

The research has been partially supported over the past five years by the TCU Research and Creative Activities Fund, which tenure-track professors can apply for, Kolesar said. However, the majority of the research money has come from grants from the National Science Foundation and from the Presby Co. of Dallas, the business unit Schachar formed to organize his research, he said.

This project still will have to pass FDA trials to determine its biocompatibility, because there is also a remote possibility that the human body could reject the artificial eye, Kolesar said.

“We also want to adapt the eye for consumer product use as well,” Kolesar said. “We can use it to simplify the complex mechanical lens systems in cameras and related products, because the human eye is composed of only a single lens, but because it is dynamic, it can focus from near to far with ease.”

Walt Williamson, chair of the engineering department, said these kinds of projects help enhance the visibility of TCU and the engineering department and make them good competitors with Texas A&M, Texas Tech and the University of Texas.

“It shows the outside world that our faculty has the tools and skill to deal with real-world problems that impact mankind’s quality of life,” Williamson said.