alt Hacker NewsThis is fun, and the modeling is cool for sure, but it's well known that ultrasound can be used with surgical precision in the human brain.
Focused ultrasound is already used for non-invasive neuromodulation. Raag Airan's lab at Stanford does this for example using ultrasound uncaging.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...
Also see the work by Urvi Vyas, eg
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27587047/
I don't mean to discount the cool imaging-related reconstruction of a point spread function, but rather to say that ultrasound attenuation through the skull an soft tissue has already been well characterized and it's not a surprise that it is viable to pass through.
Replies
OpenWater wiki > Neuromodulation: https://wiki.openwater.health/index.php/Neuromodulation
OpenwaterHealth/opw_neuromod_sw: https://github.com/OpenwaterHealth/opw_neuromod_sw :
> OpenWater's Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Platform. open-LIFU is an ultrasound platform designed to help researchers transmit focused ultrasound beams into subject’s brains, so that those researchers can learn more about how different types of ultrasound beams interact with the neurons in the brain. Unlike other focused ultrasound systems which are aimed only by their placement on the head, open-LIFU uses an array to precisely steer the ultrasound focus to the target location, while its wearable small size allows transmission through the forehead into a precise spot location in the brain even while the patient is moving.
FWIU NIRS is sufficient for most nontherepeautic diagnostics though. (Non-optogenetically, infrared light stimulates neuronal growth, and blue and green lights inhibit neuronal growth)
Not to mention transcranial doppler ultrasound for measuring blood flow.
Correct me if I’m wrong - but the novel thing is not that it’s possible for ultrasound to pass through the skull, but that it’s possible for it to pass through the skull and back in a way that an image can be reconstructed.