Dr. Gabriel Montaldo
Neuroelectronics Research Flanders (Belgium)
Functional ultrasound (fUS) is a neuroimaging technique that has been increasingly adopted by the neuroscience community in recent years. The development of fUS technology is a multidisciplinary and heterogeneous project involving electronics, ultrasound, computer science and neuroscience. Together they focus on two main questions: visualization and interpretation of brain activity.
A breakthrough in the visualization problem has been the development of high-resolution 3D imaging. This allows us to visualize the whole brain of small rodents and to use fUS as a method to explore brain-wide functional networks.
On the interpretation side, the main issue is to understand the relationship between fUS images and neuronal activity. In fact, fUS does not directly report neuronal electrical activity, but rather changes in blood volume, which are known to be related through neurovascular coupling. Because many spatiotemporal aspects of this coupling remain elusive the interpretation of the fUS signal is not straightforward.
To answer these questions, we used a high-density multi-electrode array combined with fUS to simultaneously measure brain function and neuronal activity. We showed that the fUS signal is linearly related to local neuronal spiking activity with a limited spatial spread, independent of the regions examined.
