If you are a blind child in India, you will very likely have to contend with at least two big pieces of bad news. The first bad news is that the chances of getting treatment are extremely slim to none, and that's because most of the blindness alleviation programs in the country are focused on adults, and there are very, very few hospitals that are actually equipped to treat children. In fact, if you were to be treated, you might well end up being treated by a person who has no medical credentials as this case from Rajasthan illustrates. This is a three-year-old orphan girl who had cataracts. So, her caretakers took her to the village medicine man, and instead of suggesting to the caretakers that the girl be taken to a hospital, the person decided to burn her abdomen with red-hot iron bars to drive out the demons. The second piece of bad news will be delivered to you by neuroscientists, who will tell you that if you are older than four or five years of age, that even if you have your eye corrected, the chances of your brain learning how to see are very, very slim -- again, slim or none.
在印度,如果你先天失明 你必须为之奋斗的 有两件事 第一 接受治疗的机会 极为微小,或者说近乎没有 因为在这个国家 大部分的眼科治疗 都仅仅集中提供给成人 只有极少极少数的医院 才有针对儿童的医疗设备 其实,就算能够接受治疗 也很有可能你的主治医生 根本没有医学证书 拉贾斯坦的这个例子就是这样 她是个孤儿,只有三岁 患有先天性白内障 于是她的看护人带她到 乡村诊所看病 赤脚医生没有向看护人建议 让这个女孩子去正规医院 恰恰相反,他决定以烧红的铁条 灼烧她的小腹 说是用来驱魔 :( 另一则不幸的消息 你会了解到的是 神经学家说 如果你是四到五岁以上 视力才得以恢复 大脑学习去看东西的机会 已经微乎其微 像第一条一样,几近没有机会。。。
So when I heard these two things, it troubled me deeply, both because of personal reasons and scientific reasons. So let me first start with the personal reason. It'll sound corny, but it's sincere. That's my son, Darius. As a new father, I have a qualitatively different sense of just how delicate babies are, what our obligations are towards them and how much love we can feel towards a child. I would move heaven and earth in order to get treatment for Darius, and for me to be told that there might be other Dariuses who are not getting treatment, that's just viscerally wrong. So that's the personal reason.
听到这两件事 我陷入了深深的烦恼 有个人背景方面的原因 也有科学原因 先从个人方面说起吧 听起来稀松平常,但我是非常认真的 那就是我的儿子,Darius 作为一个刚刚晋升的父亲 我从内心深处有种奇妙的感觉 小宝宝是多么的纤细微妙, 那些对他们应尽的责任 以及深深的爱护 面对孩子时我会不由自主的有所感应 我愿意上天入地 只为Darius的健康成长 当我被告知 有那么多其他的Darius 没得到任何治疗 这简直是大错特错! 这,就是我的个人原因
Scientific reason is that this notion from neuroscience of critical periods -- that if the brain is older than four or five years of age, it loses its ability to learn -- that doesn't sit well with me, because I don't think that idea has been tested adequately. The birth of the idea is from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's work, two researchers who were at Harvard, and they got the Nobel Prize in 1981 for their studies of visual physiology, which are remarkably beautiful studies, but I believe some of their work has been extrapolated into the human domain prematurely. So, they did their work with kittens, with different kinds of deprivation regiments, and those studies, which date back to the '60s, are now being applied to human children.
科学研究方面, 神经学长久以来的这种说法 认为当大脑超过 四到五岁时 将会失去学习能力 我并不赞同 因为我不觉得此理论 有广泛的实践基础 这个理论来自于 大卫胡伯和维塞尔的研究 他们是哈佛大学的两位学者 于1981年赢得诺贝尔奖 其课题是视觉生理学 那是一项非比寻常的研究 但我相信他们的一些工作 在推断的基础上 过早的进入了人类范围 事实上,他们用猫咪做实验 证实了不同残疾种类的行为 这些研究 已经是六十年代的产物 现在却还在被用于分析我们的孩子
So I felt that I needed to do two things. One: provide care to children who are currently being deprived of treatment. That's the humanitarian mission. And the scientific mission would be to test the limits of visual plasticity. And these two missions, as you can tell, thread together perfectly. One adds to the other; in fact, one would be impossible without the other. So, to implement these twin missions, a few years ago, I launched Project Prakash. Prakash, as many of you know, is the Sanskrit word for light, and the idea is that in bringing light into the lives of children, we also have a chance of shedding light on some of the deepest mysteries of neuroscience. And the logo -- even though it looks extremely Irish, it's actually derived from the Indian symbol of Diya, an earthen lamp. The Prakash, the overall effort has three components: outreach, to identify children in need of care; medical treatment; and in subsequent study. And I want to show you a short video clip that illustrates the first two components of this work.
就这样,我认定自己需要做两件事 第一: 为得不到 治疗的儿童们 提供关照 这是人道主义职责所在 科学的职责在于 要去学习 视觉系统延伸的极限 很显然,这两项任务放在一起 会是多么的珠联璧合 彼此密不可分 这般如此,为了实施 此两个任务 几年前我发起了普拉卡项目 普拉卡,你们也许知道 在梵语中意为 光明 我们希望能 给孩子们的生命中带来光明 同时有机会 搞定一些 神经学上的迷思 它的图标,尽管看起来特别像爱尔兰文字 其实是源自 古印度代表大地之神的明灯 普拉卡 总的来说 专注于三个方面 从长计议,去帮助需要关爱 治疗和学习的孩子们 现在我要播放一段视频 来展示前两个方面
This is an outreach station conducted at a school for the blind.
这个长远的安置 引导着盲童学校
(Text: Most of the children are profoundly and permanently blind ...)
画外音:大部分孩子都是重度永久性的失明
Pawan Sinha: So, because this is a school for the blind, many children have permanent conditions. That's a case of microphthalmos, which is malformed eyes, and that's a permanent condition; it cannot be treated. That's an extreme of micropthalmos called enophthalmos. But, every so often, we come across children who show some residual vision, and that is a very good sign that the condition might actually be treatable. So, after that screening, we bring the children to the hospital. That's the hospital we're working with in Delhi, the Schroff Charity Eye Hospital. It has a very well-equipped pediatric ophthalmic center, which was made possible in part by a gift from the Ronald McDonald charity. So, eating burgers actually helps.
教授:由于这是所盲人学校 很多孩子的情况一生都无法治愈 这就是小眼症 也称眼部发育畸形 一种永久性的损害 无法治愈 这一例是极端小眼症 叫做眼球内陷 尽管情况如此糟糕,我们还是会遇到 有些孩子留有少许视力 这是非常好的迹象 说明这种病例有治疗的希望 我们把类似这样经过挑选的孩子送进医院观察 我们与这家坐落在德里的医院合作 斯沃夫慈善眼科医院 它有个设备精良的 儿童眼科中心 多亏了罗兰 麦当劳的慷慨捐助 使其成为可能 你看,多吃点儿汉堡包真的有用
(Text: Such examinations allow us to improve eye-health in many children, and ... ... help us find children who can participate in Project Prakash.)
文字:(这类的检测使我们提高了 许多孩子的眼部健康状况并且 协助我们寻找那些可以参与普拉卡计划的孩子们)
PS: So, as I zoom in to the eyes of this child, you will see the cause of his blindness. The whites that you see in the middle of his pupils are congenital cataracts, so opacities of the lens. In our eyes, the lens is clear, but in this child, the lens has become opaque, and therefore he can't see the world. So, the child is given treatment. You'll see shots of the eye. Here's the eye with the opaque lens, the opaque lens extracted and an acrylic lens inserted. And here's the same child three weeks post-operation, with the right eye open.
近距离观察这个孩子的眼睛 你会看见是什么使他失明 你看瞳孔中间的这块白斑 是先天性白内障 挡住眼球水晶体 我们眼睛里的水晶体是透明的 但是这个孩子,他的水晶体变得浑浊 就这样儿,他什么都看不见 于是这个孩子接受了治疗,注意看他眼部的照片 这是那只盲眼 拿出浑浊的晶状体 用树脂晶状体取代 同样的孩子 手术3个星期后 右眼看得见了
(Applause)
(掌声)
Thank you.
谢谢
So, even from that little clip, you can begin to get the sense that recovery is possible, and we have now provided treatment to over 200 children, and the story repeats itself. After treatment, the child gains significant functionality. In fact, the story holds true even if you have a person who got sight after several years of deprivation. We did a paper a few years ago about this woman that you see on the right, SRD, and she got her sight late in life, and her vision is remarkable at this age. I should add a tragic postscript to this -- she died two years ago in a bus accident. So, hers is just a truly inspiring story -- unknown, but inspiring story. So when we started finding these results, as you might imagine, it created quite a bit of stir in the scientific and the popular press. Here's an article in Nature that profiled this work, and another one in Time. So, we were fairly convinced -- we are convinced -- that recovery is feasible, despite extended visual deprivation.
从这段小影片中,你已经了解到 康复是有可能的 目前我们已经 为超过200名儿童提供了治疗 故事在重复上演着 进过治疗,这些孩子们 的视力得到极大的进步 其实,同样的示例 发生在失明多年的 病患身上 几年前我们有篇论文 就是关于右边这位妇女的故事 她晚年才开始看见东西的 她的视力在这个年龄段是非常出色的 我得加个悲剧桥段 两年前她去世了 死于巴士车祸 她是个真实而激动人心的示例 尽管无法得知未来会怎样,不过非常激励我们 当我们开始寻找这类示例时 能够想象,在科学界和流行出版行业 激起过一些浪潮 这是刊登在《自然》 上面的文章 描述这项工作 时代周刊也曾经报道 我们十分信服 回复是很有可能的 即使是针对长期视力衰弱
The next obvious question to ask: What is the process of recovery? So, the way we study that is, let's say we find a child who has light sensitivity. The child is provided treatment, and I want to stress that the treatment is completely unconditional; there is no quid pro quo. We treat many more children then we actually work with. Every child who needs treatment is treated. After treatment, about every week, we run the child on a battery of simple visual tests in order to see how their visual skills are coming on line. And we try to do this for as long as possible. This arc of development gives us unprecedented and extremely valuable information about how the scaffolding of vision gets set up. What might be the causal connections between the early developing skills and the later developing ones?
下一个问题显然就是 恢复的过程是怎样呢? 我们是这么进行研究的: 先要寻找一个对光线敏感的孩子 给他进行治疗 我想要强调一点这类治疗 是完全免费的 无需置疑 我们治疗非常多的孩子们,通过他们开展工作 每个需要的孩子都会治疗 治疗过后的几乎每个星期♪ 我们给孩子进行 简单的视觉测试 从而观察他们的进步 是符合预期效果的 我们试着去做,越多越好 这条发展之路 给了我们前所未有 极为珍贵的信息 学习视力框架是 如何构建的 其中 早期发展技巧 与后期发展有什么因果联系吗?
And we've used this general approach to study many different visual proficiencies, but I want to highlight one particular one, and that is image parsing into objects. So, any image of the kind that you see on the left, be it a real image or a synthetic image, it's made up of little regions that you see in the middle column, regions of different colors, different luminances. The brain has this complex task of putting together, integrating, subsets of these regions into something that's more meaningful, into what we would consider to be objects, as you see on the right. And nobody knows how this integration happens, and that's the question we asked with Project Prakash.
我们用类似的方式来学习 很多不同的视觉能力 但是我想要特别强调其中的一种 那就是怎样把图像解析为物体 看,你现在看到在左边任一种图像 不论是真的物体或者是人造的 都以小的区域构成 就是中间的这些小东西 这些区域有各式各样的颜色,光泽 大脑用其复杂的结构 来吸取判断 小区域中更小的部分 转化成有意义的信息 告诉我们哪些是真实的物体 像你在右侧看到的这样 没人知道这个过程是怎么发生的 这就是我们在普拉卡课题上的挑战
So, here's what happens very soon after the onset of sight. Here's a person who had gained sight just a couple of weeks ago, and you see Ethan Myers, a graduate student from MIT, running the experiment with him. His visual-motor coordination is quite poor, but you get a general sense of what are the regions that he's trying to trace out. If you show him real world images, if you show others like him real world images, they are unable to recognize most of the objects because the world to them is over-fragmented; it's made up of a collage, a patchwork, of regions of different colors and luminances. And that's what's indicated in the green outlines. When you ask them, "Even if you can't name the objects, just point to where the objects are," these are the regions that they point to. So the world is this complex patchwork of regions. Even the shadow on the ball becomes its own object. Interestingly enough, you give them a few months, and this is what happens.
其实是这样的 得到视觉不久 这个人几周前刚刚复明 这位是伊坦迈尔,麻省理工大学的学生 在与他做实验 他的视觉配合度还很差 你可以从中得到一种感觉 他到底在忙着找一些什么区域 如果给他看真实的图像 或者跟他这样儿的初期康复者看这种图像 它们不能辨识大部分物体 因为这个世界分成了很多小块儿 抽象断裂的小块儿 有着很多不同的颜色和光泽 类似那些绿色划线 当你向他们问起 不需要命名,只要指着物体就可以 他们指出来这样一些区域 他的世界非常复杂 有一块一块的很多区域 甚至球上方的阴影 变成独体的物体 有趣的是 几个月后 发生了一些事
Doctor: How many are these?
医生:看见几个东西?
Patient: These are two things.
病患:这有两件物体
Doctor: What are their shapes?
医生:它们什么形状?
Patient: Their shapes ... This one is a circle, and this is a square.
病患:它们的形状。。 这个是圆形 这个 是正方形
PS: A very dramatic transformation has come about. And the question is: What underlies this transformation? It's a profound question, and what's even more amazing is how simple the answer is. The answer lies in motion and that's what I want to show you in the next clip.
相当戏剧化的转变发生了 问题就是 这种转换说明什么? 这是个很深奥的问题 更使人惊奇的是 答案竟然那么简单 答案来自于运动 那就是下一段视频我想要给大家展示的
Doctor: What shape do you see here?
医生:你能看到什么形状?
Patient: I can't make it out.
病患:我不太清楚
Doctor: Now?
医生:现在呢?
Patient: Triangle.
病患:三角形
Doctor: How many things are these? Now, how many things are these?
医生:这有几个物体? 现在,有几个呢?
Patient: Two.
病患:两个
Doctor: What are these things?
医生:这些是什么?
Patient: A square and a circle.
病患:一个正方形和一个圆形
PS: And we see this pattern over and over again. The one thing the visual system needs in order to begin parsing the world is dynamic information. So the inference we are deriving from this, and several such experiments, is that dynamic information processing, or motion processing, serves as the bedrock for building the rest of the complexity of visual processing; it leads to visual integration and eventually to recognition.
这种行为会反复出现 视觉系统解读世界 需要的重点 是动感信息 我们从这个实验还有很多其他实验中 提取的是 动感信息进程 又叫移动进程 的作用是建构视觉 进程的支架 它带领了视觉合成 最终实现视觉感知
This simple idea has far reaching implications. And let me just quickly mention two, one, drawing from the domain of engineering, and one from the clinic. So, from the perspective of engineering, we can ask: Goven that we know that motion is so important for the human visual system, can we use this as a recipe for constructing machine-based vision systems that can learn on their own, that don't need to be programmed by a human programmer? And that's what we're trying to do.
这个貌似简单的道理有深远的影响 让我大概来提两点 一方面是科技工程学 另一个是临床 那么,从工程学的角度来看 我们可能会问,了解了 动态对人类视觉行程是如此的重要 能不能用这个配方 来搭建机器人视觉系统? 使它自己学习,都不用程序操纵 和人的协助 这就是我们在
I'm at MIT, at MIT you need to apply whatever basic knowledge you gain. So we are creating Dylan, which is a computational system with an ambitious goal of taking in visual inputs of the same kind that a human child would receive, and autonomously discovering: What are the objects in this visual input? So, don't worry about the internals of Dylan. Here, I'm just going to talk about how we test Dylan. The way we test Dylan is by giving it inputs, as I said, of the same kind that a baby, or a child in Project Prakash would get. But for a long time we couldn't quite figure out: Wow can we get these kinds of video inputs? So, I thought, could we have Darius serve as our babycam carrier, and that way get the inputs that we feed into Dylan? So that's what we did. (Laughter) I had to have long conversations with my wife. (Laughter) In fact, Pam, if you're watching this, please forgive me.
麻省理工大学正在研究的课题,这里 需要应用任何你学到的基础知识 这样,我们制造了德兰 一个机器人系统 它有个雄心勃勃的目标 就是获取视觉输入 类似小孩接受的信息一样 然后自觉地去发掘 这个视觉输入的目的 别担心德兰内部长什么样 在这里,我只需要介绍 我们怎么测试她 测试德兰的方法是通过 给它输入一些信息 类似婴儿能看到或者其他普拉卡课题的孩子能看到的 但是很长一段时间里我们找不出来 到哪去弄这种视频输入 所以,我想到的是。。。 不如让我儿子 当个婴儿摄像头 就这样拍到了德兰的输入视频 我们是这么做的 笑声 为这,我必须跟老婆进行一次长谈 笑声 潘米,如果你在看的话 原谅我吧
So, we modified the optics of the camera in order to mimic the baby's visual acuity. As some of you might know, babyies are born pretty much legally blind. Their acuity -- our acuity is 20/20; babies' acuity is like 20/800, so they are looking at the world in a very, very blurry fashion. Here's what a baby-cam video looks like.
于是我们改装了摄像机镜头 用于模仿小婴儿的视觉精度 大家可能知道了 新生宝宝总的来说是看不见什么东西的 他们的视力如何- 我们成人是20/20 婴儿的精度大概只有20/800 所以他们眼中的世界 非常非常的模糊 这个就是婴儿摄像头看到的
(Laughter) (Applause)
笑声 鼓掌
Thankfully, there isn't any audio to go with this. What's amazing is that working with such highly degraded input, the baby, very quickly, is able to discover meaning in such input. But then two or three days afterward, babies begin to pay attention to their mother's or their father's face. How does that happen? We want Dylan to be able to do that, and using this mantra of motion, Dylan actually can do that. So, given that kind of video input, with just about six or seven minutes worth of video, Dylan can begin to extract patterns that include faces. So, it's an important demonstration of the power of motion.
幸亏没有音频 跟着图像伴奏 令人惊叹的是, 宝宝们看到的世界如此的高度模糊 他们还能很快的 发现这种输入的意义 只要两三天, 宝宝会开始注意到 他的爸爸妈妈的脸孔。 这是怎么回事?我们希望德兰也能做到 利用动态原理 德兰实际上真的做到了 给它输入这种视频 才六七分钟的短片 德兰能开始提取模式 包括面孔。 所以,这是个很重要的展示 说明了动态的重要性
The clinical implication, it comes from the domain of autism. Visual integration has been associated with autism by several researchers. When we saw that, we asked: Could the impairment in visual integration be the manifestation of something underneath, of dynamic information processing deficiencies in autism? Because, if that hypothesis were to be true, it would have massive repercussions in our understanding of what's causing the many different aspects of the autism phenotype.
临床上,它的应用来源于自闭症的研究 视觉合成疗法开始的结合是自闭症 已经有些科学家在研究了 我们看到这些,提出的问题是 视觉系统的合成缺陷 会不会是某种表像 而是自闭症的动态信息处理缺陷 因为如果这个假说是真的 会给我们的研究带来巨大影响 特别是不同的 自闭症的显现
What you're going to see are video clips of two children -- one neurotypical, one with autism, playing Pong. So, while the child is playing Pong, we are tracking where they're looking. In red are the eye movement traces. This is the neurotypical child, and what you see is that the child is able to make cues of the dynamic information to predict where the ball is going to go. Even before the ball gets to a place, the child is already looking there. Contrast this with a child with autism playing the same game. Instead of anticipating, the child always follows where the ball has been. The efficiency of the use of dynamic information seems to be significantly compromised in autism. So we are pursuing this line of work and hopefully we'll have more results to report soon.
你会看到的是 两个孩子的视频,一个正常 另一个自闭症的孩子,在玩撞球游戏 这样,当孩子在玩儿的时候,我们跟踪他们眼球的方向 红色是眼睛运动的路径 这个是正常的孩子,你会看到 这个孩子能推断出 球的动态信息 然后预测出球要去哪里 在球到达之前 孩子已经能看向那边了 相反的,另一个 自闭症的孩子在玩的时候 不能预测 他只能追着球的运动 使用动态信息 的效率 看来在自闭症人身上低多了 我们一直追随这方面的工作 希望有一天 有更多的研究报告出炉
Looking ahead, if you think of this disk as representing all of the children we've treated so far, this is the magnitude of the problem. The red dots are the children we have not treated. So, there are many, many more children who need to be treated, and in order to expand the scope of the project, we are planning on launching The Prakash Center for Children, which will have a dedicated pediatric hospital, a school for the children we are treating and also a cutting-edge research facility. The Prakash Center will integrate health care, education and research in a way that truly creates the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.
向前看去,如果你觉得这个圆形 用以代表所有 我们已经治疗过的儿童 这就是问题的总量 红色的点是我们治疗过的孩子 所以,还有很多很多孩子,需要接受治疗 为了能扩大课题的范围 我们计划要发展 普拉卡儿童中心 包括专业眼科医院 为患病儿童开设的学校 还有前沿科技研究机构 普拉卡中心将会结合医疗 教育和科研为一体 真正实现 合众为一的伟大力量
So, to summarize: Prakash, in its five years of existence, it's had an impact in multiple areas, ranging from basic neuroscience plasticity and learning in the brain, to clinically relevant hypotheses like in autism, the development of autonomous machine vision systems, education of the undergraduate and graduate students, and most importantly in the alleviation of childhood blindness. And for my students and I, it's been just a phenomenal experience because we have gotten to do interesting research, while at the same time helping the many children that we have worked with.
总的来说,在普拉卡成立5年之际 它已经影响到了很广的范围 从基础神经学 和脑神经学 到临床相关的设想,比如说自闭症 有半自动可视机器人 大学生,研究生的教育学习 最重要的在于减轻 孩子们失明的痛苦 对于我的学生,还有我本人 这是多么非凡的经历 因为我们在做着特别有趣的研究 同时 帮助了那么多与我们工作同在的孩子们
Thank you very much.
非常感谢
(Applause)
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