Transcranial focused ultrasound transducer architectures: single-element, phased arrays, and acoustic holograms

• A Frontiers in Neuroscience review compares single-element transducers, phased arrays, and acoustic holograms for transcranial focused ultrasound on focal volume, steering, and aberration correction.¹
• When aperture, transmit frequency, focal depth, effective source geometry, and aberration correction are held equivalent, splitting the aperture into many independently driven elements does not by itself shrink the diffraction-limited focal volume.¹
• Element count alone is therefore not a shortcut to tighter foci under matched operating conditions.¹
• Phased arrays and acoustic holograms differ mainly in how they trade electronic steering, skull-aberration correction capability, and system cost rather than in baseline diffraction-limited spot size.¹
• The paper is framed as a hardware design guide for transcranial FUS systems used in neuromodulation.^{1 1}

Footnotes

1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2026.1891259 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶