A packed program for fUS at SfN 2024
Functional ultrasound featured strongly at the SfN Neuroscience 2024 conference, and here we round up our perspective on some of the highlights.
What aspects of functional ultrasound featured at SfN 2024? Read on to discover our pick of the key findings from the Chicago meeting in October.
Early October 2024 saw the gathering in Chicago of researchers from across the globe for Neuroscience 2024, organized by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN).
We had several Iconeus representatives at SfN – both for the scientific content and to man the booth – and as always, we found it to be a very interesting and worthwhile event. This year, we found it especially interesting because the scientific content of the event reflected the increasing interest in using fUS for clinical research.
So for those fUS enthusiasts amongst us who missed out on any of the posters or mini/nanosymposia, we thought we’d highlight some of the key findings. Dig in!
Using fUS for clinical research studies
In a particularly interesting piece of work, Vasileios Christopoulos and Sofia Sakellardidi from UC Riverside showed in a poster how fUS can be used to characterize brain and spinal cord hemodynamics in response to bladder muscle activity (micturition). Their approach allowed the areas involved in urine release to be identified, and even predicted, providing proof-of-concept that fUS could help develop technologies to restore bladder function in patients with urinary incontinence.
This focus on the spinal cord studies was in fact a strong theme at SfN, with two nanosymposia (chaired by members of Christopoulos’ team at UC Riverside) devoted to the use of fUS in studies targeted at patients who had received treatment for chronic back pain. The first described stimulation of the peroneal nerve following surgery, while the second described the results of monitoring hemodynamic activity following implantation of an epidural electrical spinal cord stimulation device. fUS was noted to provide “a new level of precision” for in vivo assessment of functional neural activity modulation, and its potential as a clinical monitoring technology came across strongly.
Advances in brain–machine interfaces
Providing a different angle on the clinical studies mentioned above is the use of fUS for brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), especially those with potential for treating people with debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders.
A particular highlight was a poster presented by Lydia Lin from Caltech, who showed how fUS can be used to decode motor effector information from the primary motor cortex in a human participant, using an ‘acoustic window’ implant. This builds on previous work in non-human primates, and Lydia pointed out that fUS provides a balanced tradeoff between the invasiveness of surgery and spatial resolution.
On the same topic of BMIs, Therri Callier, also from Caltech, presented a poster describing work towards “increasingly unrestrained” motor control in a saccade-to-target task. This work (which, we would modestly point out, has input from Iconeus founders!) suggests that fUS signals could serve as the basis for continuous control of a motor-based BMI.
Investigating the effects of pharmaceuticals on the brain
Also in the direction of clinical applications, the use of fUS to investigate the action of pharmaceuticals was another strong theme at SfN.
In his poster, Iconeus staff member Samuel Diebolt presented work using fUS to look at the brain-wide effects of cannabinoids in awake and behaving mice, which offers insights into the intricate mechanisms underlying cannabinoid-induced alterations in brain function, with therapeutic relevance.
Juho Oksman and Artem Shatillo from Charles River Discovery Research Services (one of our customers) presented a poster on evaluating fUS within the streptozotocin model of diabetes in rats. They carried out both structural eye scans and functional imaging in the brain, and found important functional alterations in this model compared to controls. Another drug – dizocilpine – was the focus of a poster by Erik Hakopian from UC Riverside, on work using fUS to explore the drug’s effects on the functional connectivity between brain areas involved in memory and learning. This, he said, may have relevance to its use as a rodent research model for neuropsychiatric disorders.
The same drug was the subject of a poster presented by Jared Deighton from the University of Tennessee. In this work, convolutional neural networks were used alongside fUS to understand the pharmacokinetic process across a wider region of the mouse brain than would normally be investigated, with potential to give a less biased assessment.
Also on the clinical theme, Sarah Stankowicz from Biogen presented a poster on using fUS to help translate preclinical work in rodents to the clinic, in particular the effects of vascular reactivity in a genetic model of human disease. She said that, with its combined low cost and high coverage, fUS should continue to aid drug development, “further increasing the probability of technical and regulatory success for […] neurological diseases”.
Uncovering the mechanisms of visual processing
Studying how the brain processes visual information continues to be a fertile ground for research, and there were two posters on this topic.
Dominique Diegenthaler from the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Intelligence in München presented a poster describing the use of brain-wide fUS to investigate if, how and where visual object identification is computed in the rodent brain. Surprisingly, they found that sensitivity to visual objects was concentrated in parts of the hippocampal formation and the retrosplenial cortex, rather than the higher-order visual regions.
In another poster, our Iconeus colleague Felipe Cybis Pereira described the application of fUS to the brain-wide measurement of cerebral blood volume to uncover insights into spatial navigation in freely moving rats. Correlations were found between animal speed and changes in blood volume in the hippocampal formation, along with minute-scale oscillations, reinforcing the value of of fUS as “an interesting tool for unconstrained deep brain imaging”.
And finally, for those attendees looking to get the broader perspective on fUS applications, we should mention two events: the minisymposium chaired by Iconeus founder Zsolt Lenkei on recent breakthroughs in fUS; and the nanosymposium headed by Chiara Pepe from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, on the value of fUS for probing the large-scale dynamics of networks in the mouse brain. Chiara noted that the spatiotemporal precision achievable with fUS aids the capture of functional connectivity dynamics, and supports its use as alternative to fMRI for network analysis in small animals.
Conclusion: A busy but rewarding event
SfN is always packed, and for those not used to smaller conferences, it can feel a bit overwhelming due to its sheer size! But on the other hand, it means there is always something going on, and we truly enjoy being there to find out about the latest research and talk to people as enthusiastic about neuroscience as we are.
It was a good event for Iconeus too, with many visitors to our booth, and connections made with numerous potential customers. Rewardingly, our Iconeus One ‘Product Theater’, hosted by Soumee Bhattacharya, was one of the most well-attended sessions, demonstrating that fUS has gained considerable recognition within the neuroscience community. We look forward to the time when it will be viewed as a ‘standard’ lab technique!
If you’d like to talk to one of our specialists about any of the topics covered at SfN, then do get in touch.
