What is the connection between Australian coral and a major improvement in artificial eye technology? The answer, according to materials scientist Dr Besim Ben-Nissan, lies in the six muscles that move the human eye.

Dr Ben-Nissan, a member of the Materials Technology Research Group, heads a team working on a prosthetic eye design that will not only look like a real eye, but will also move like one. Coral is the template for a porous ceramic coating that will allow muscles and other surrounding tissues to attach to an implanted artificial eye.

"Current artificial eyes fail to deliver natural movement and can cause sagging of the lids due to the unsupported weight of the ball," Dr Ben-Nissan said. "Since the 1970s, it's been known that if a ceramic material the body won't reject has the appropriate surface pattern of interconnected pores, then hard and soft tissue will grow into it.

"We have found that some Australian corals have inter-connected pores of the right size, and our aim is to incorporate these coral patterns into the ceramic of artificial eyes. Strong attachment of surrounding muscle fibres and connective tissue will then result in life-like movement."

The skeletal structures of the coral polyps are being used to cast a synthetic ceramic material that mimics human bone, and so is stable in contact with body fluids and is not rejected. The material, hydroxyapatite, is used commonly for prosthetic devices but the UTS researchers have developed a new technique for applying a very thin but durable layer of it to other materials in any shape.

"We are making the eye implant hollow so that potentially it could house electronics which, when linked to the optic nerve, could generate artificial vision," Dr Ben-Nissan said. "The technology does not yet exist that could replicate true vision, but it would be quite possible now for an electronic implant to allow a blind person to sense the difference between day and night.