Vienneau, Emelina; Weeks, Abbie; Morgan, Victoria; Byram, Brett. “Reliable Transcranial Functional Ultrasound in an Adult Cohort (N=13).” IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Joint Symposium, UFFC-JS 2024 – Proceedings, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1109/UFFC-JS60046.2024.10793710.
Functional ultrasound was first tested in rodents, but more recently, it has been used in humans in situations where the skull can be bypassed, such as during surgery when the skull is removed or in newborns whose skulls have not yet fused. While these demonstrations are important, they do not allow for widespread clinical or scientific use in humans.
In this study, we successfully performed transcranial functional ultrasound in 13 human subjects. To test its effectiveness, we used a breath-hold task. While we relied mostly on standard methods, we introduced two key improvements: direct axial motion correction and compound Barker coded excitation. Across all 13 participants, the functional ultrasound signal showed a correlation of 0.53±0.08 with the expected brain activity pattern, which is comparable to similar functional MRI (fMRI) studies.
