Functional ultrasound imaging could be 1000x better than fMRI—and it's just getting started
Functional Ultrasound Imaging (fUSI) from scratch
Functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) captures rapid movies of brain tissue, tracking blood flow changes with up to 20% signal change—far exceeding fMRI's few-percent BOLD. It offers ten times higher linear resolution, 1000x more voxels, and no magnet. I break down the physics and signal processing, from plane-wave transmission to Power Doppler and clutter filtering, and share Python tutorials to make fUSI accessible beyond Matlab. The modality is far from its ceiling.
The percentage signal change measured with fUSI is remarkably high: up to 20% compared to fMRI's few-percent BOLD signal.
- tokyovigilante
How do you propose to solve the “rigid skull” problem (footnote 2 in the post)? Most people like having theirs intact during diagnostic imaging.
I await clinical use of this with bated breath…
- kanzure
That's cool. Ultrasound imaging should be much more broadly available, like household object next to your toothbrush. I wonder how OpenWater open-source focused ultrasound stimulation is doing.
- bbor
Very interesting, great write up, and awesome blog in general!
I never got to invest serious time in this idea, but MMW: trimodal EEG+fNIRS+fUSI dry headsets are going to change everything. Each technique has its strengths, and there are already people hacking together trimodal prototypes as we speak.