Audition Team, Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs CNRS UMR 8248, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France
Charlie Demene
Institut Langevin, ESPCI ParisTech, INSERM U979, CNRS UMR 7587, PSL Research University, Paris, France
Constantin Girard
Audition Team, Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs CNRS UMR 8248, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France
Susanne Radtke-Schuller
Audition Team, Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs CNRS UMR 8248, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France
Shihab Shamma
Audition Team, Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs CNRS UMR 8248, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France; Institute for Systems Research, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland College Park, Maryland, United States
Mickael Tanter
Institut Langevin, ESPCI ParisTech, INSERM U979, CNRS UMR 7587, PSL Research University, Paris, France
A major challenge in neuroscience is to longitudinally monitor whole brain activity across multiple spatial scales in the same animal. Functional UltraSound (fUS) is an emerging technology that offers images of cerebral blood volume over large brain portions. Here we show for the first time its capability to resolve the functional organization of sensory systems at multiple scales in awake animals, both within small structures by precisely mapping and differentiating sensory responses, and between structures by elucidating the connectivity scheme of top-down projections. We demonstrate that fUS provides stable (over days), yet rapid, highly-resolved 3D tonotopic maps in the auditory pathway of awake ferrets, thus revealing its unprecedented functional resolution (100/300µm). This was performed in four different brain regions, including very small (1–2 mm3 size), deeply situated subcortical (8 mm deep) and previously undescribed structures in the ferret. Furthermore, we used fUS to map long-distance projections from frontal cortex, a key source of sensory response modulation, to auditory cortex.
