Grant: Project Grant

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a widely used and safe method to image the brain. While it is mostly used to diagnose and monitor diseases, it can also be used to monitor brain activity, and this is called functional MRI (fMRI). fMRI has become a very important scientific tool to study brain function in health and disease where it is used like a movie camera to film how brain activity changes while you do a task or simply rest. Ultrasound is another safe and widely used technology that can be used for medical imaging. However, ultrasound can also be focused, like a magnifying glass can focus light, through the skull on any region of the brain. In recent years, it has been shown that turning the ultrasound on and off at specific rates can stimulate the brain much like an implanted electrode can with electricity. This technique is called transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS). The goal of this research proposal is to combine TUS with fMRI to allow scientists to simultaneously stimulate the brain at one location (with TUS) and record the response (with fMRI) across the entire brain. To achieve this, we will develop new technology to allow the two techniques to work well together. We will then use TUS to stimulate regions near the surface of the brain (cortex) that control movement and perform detailed characterization of the changes in activity across the brain. We will also develop a precise TUS and fMRI setup that can stimulate very small (2-4 mm) regions deep in the brain. We will test this setup in patients with movement disorders, like Essential Tremor and Parkinson's disease, where we aim to identify a small deep brain structure, which is not visible on MRI, that is known to cause tremor and is a common target of brain surgery. Advancing this capability will provide a powerful tool for scientists to study brain function and for clinicians to treat conditions such as Parkinson's disease and depression.