And if you want the full backstory, big thanks to Keith Murphy and Charles Caskey for having me on the FUS Forward podcast to share the journey and pineapple juice addiction :): open.spotify.com/episode/0y2W...
This points to a new way forward for exploring deep circuits, mapping how they support cognition, testing brain–cognition theories more directly, and opening new paths for mental health, all with non invasive ultrasound.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the same region disrupts these very processes, giving us a rare comparison and strong evidence that we were perturbing the NAcc itself rather than nearby structures. A region once considered unreachable without neurosurgery is now in reach non invasively.
We found that TUS can selectively modulate the NAcc and shift both neural activity and behaviour. Stimulating this region changed BOLD responses tied to reward expectations and altered how people learned from outcomes, all supported by a computational RL model.
New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.
A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing.
Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br...
Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...
So thrilled and humbled to be part of a £6.5M project funded by the @aria-research.bsky.social. Together with NHS Trust and Forest Neurotech, we’re trialing a whole-brain interface using ultrasound which could transform mental health! 🔊🧠 @bricplymouth.bsky.social @plymuni.bsky.social
