Model-based navigation of transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation in humans: Application to targeting the amygdala and thalamus

Mohammad Daneshzand; Bastien Guerin; Parker Kotlarz; Tina Chou; Darin D. Dougherty; Brian L. Edlow; Aapo Nummenmaa

Brain Stimulation (Jul 2024)

Model-based navigation of transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation in humans: Application to targeting the amygdala and thalamus

Mohammad Daneshzand,
Bastien Guerin,
Parker Kotlarz,
Tina Chou,
Darin D. Dougherty,
Brian L. Edlow,
Aapo Nummenmaa

Affiliations

Mohammad Daneshzand: Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Bastien Guerin: Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Corresponding author. Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Dept. of Radiology, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, 149 13th Street, Charlestown, MA, 02129, USA.
Parker Kotlarz: Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Tina Chou: Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
Darin D. Dougherty: Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA
Brian L. Edlow: Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Aapo Nummenmaa: Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Journal volume & issue: Vol. 17, no. 4
pp. 958 – 969

Abstract

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Background: Transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) neuromodulation has shown promise in animals but is challenging to translate to humans because of the thicker skull that heavily scatters ultrasound waves. Objective: We develop and disseminate a model-based navigation (MBN) tool for acoustic dose delivery in the presence of skull aberrations that is easy to use by non-specialists. Methods: We pre-compute acoustic beams for thousands of virtual transducer locations on the scalp of the subject under study. We use the hybrid angular spectrum solver mSOUND, which runs in ∼4 s per solve per CPU yielding pre-computation times under 1 h for scalp meshes with up to 4000 faces and a parallelization factor of 5. We combine this pre-computed set of beam solutions with optical tracking, thus allowing real-time display of the tFUS beam as the operator freely navigates the transducer around the subject’ scalp. We assess the impact of MBN versus line-of-sight targeting (LOST) positioning in simulations of 13 subjects. Results: Our navigation tool has a display refresh rate of ∼10 Hz. In our simulations, MBN increased the acoustic dose in the thalamus and amygdala by 8–67 % compared to LOST and avoided complete target misses that affected 10–20 % of LOST cases. MBN also yielded a lower variability of the deposited dose across subjects than LOST. Conclusions: MBN may yield greater and more consistent (less variable) ultrasound dose deposition than transducer placement with line-of-sight targeting, and thus could become a helpful tool to improve the efficacy of tFUS neuromodulation.

Published in Brain Stimulation

ISSN: 1935-861X (Print); 1876-4754 (Online)
Publisher: Elsevier
Country of publisher: United States
LCC subjects: Medicine: Internal medicine: Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Website: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/brain-stimulation

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