Neural Noise

Holographic transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation

2 min read

  • Holographic transcranial ultrasound (tUS) targets distributed brain circuits and improves stimulation efficacy compared with single-focus methods (Nature).1
  • Cooperative recruitment of distributed circuits by holographic tUS is relevant for therapeutic and research neuromodulation.1 1

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

  • The primary source is a Nature Biomedical Engineering paper (Estrada, Chen, Lemaire et al., Nat. Biomed. Eng. 10, 6–15, 2026) demonstrating holographic transcranial ultrasound stimulation (hTUS) in the living mouse brain.2
  • The team (NYU Langone Health, ETH Zurich, and University of Zurich) used a helmet-shaped array of 512 ultrasound emitters to generate acoustic holograms that focus interfering waves into defined patterns (e.g., triangles or pentagons) on the cortical surface.2
  • The system steers three to five precisely defined focal points simultaneously, going beyond conventional single-focus TUS, and is validated with concurrent cortex-wide calcium (Ca²⁺) imaging plus a fiberscope/camera to visualize directly activated targets.2
  • By cooperatively recruiting distributed, interconnected circuits, hTUS lowers the neural activation threshold by about an order of magnitude (~10×) relative to single-spot stimulation.2
  • Stimulation used ~2 MHz ultrasound with 150 ms pulses; a mechanistic simplified cortical network model (sCNM) attributes the reduced threshold to convergent excitatory (AMPA) post-synaptic currents across co-stimulated nodes.2
  • An empirical model linked activation to radiation-force density with a unified threshold of ~0.15 mN, outperforming predictions based on pressure or acoustic power alone.2
  • The authors note the work used 2 MHz for the mouse skull and that translation to the sub-megahertz range needed to penetrate the human skull remains to be demonstrated.2
  • Independent coverage from ETH Zurich frames the non-invasive, through-skull method as opening avenues for network-level treatments of disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and depression.3

Footnotes

  1. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiX0FVX3lxTFBTSzRVMGctSzFKb2dIdjBHVC1YUS1ZdGd4MW5Vemtfc0pQY0UtSl9oMk0tNnVRQ2dxZ1lKTjltOWNxcHhVOE1aLUZvSlEwek4weWROdVViYXJwWGdFaUdn?oc=5 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-025-01449-x ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/10/researchers-use-ultrasound-holograms-to-influence-brain-networks.html ↩

Graph View