2024/12/02 by Cyril Atkinson-Clément, Mohammad Alkhawashki, Marilyn Gatica +2 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Engineering · Medicine · #Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Imaging #Ultrasound Imaging and Elastography #Ultrasound and Hyperthermia Applications
paper · doi:10.1038/s41598-024-81102-w
openalex publication_date 2024/12/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Non-invasive neuromodulation represents a major opportunity for brain interventions, and transcranial focused ultrasound (FUS) is one of the most promising approaches. However, some challenges prevent the community from fully understanding its outcomes. We aimed to address one of them and unravel the temporal dynamics of FUS effects in humans. Twenty-two healthy volunteers participated in the study. Eleven received FUS in the right inferior frontal cortex while the other 11 were stimulated in the right thalamus. Using a temporal dynamic approach, we compared resting-state fMRI seed-based functional connectivity obtained before and after FUS. We also assessed behavioural changes as measured with a task of reactive motor inhibition. Our findings reveal that the effects of FUS are predominantly time-constrained and spatially distributed in brain regions functionally connected with the directly stimulated area. In addition, mediation analysis highlighted that FUS applied in the right inferior cortex was associated with behavioural alterations which was directly explained by the applied acoustic pressure and the brain functional connectivity change we observed. Our study underscored that the biological effects of FUS are indicative of behavioural changes observed more than an hour following stimulation and are directly related to the applied acoustic pressure.