Congratulations to CPIN Faculty Drs. Andres Lozano and Robert Chen and CPIN Graduate Can Sarica on their recent publication
Congratulations to CPIN Faculty Dr. Andres Lozano (Professor, IMS, top right), Dr. Robert Chen (Professor, IMS, bottom left), and CPIN Graduate Dr. Can Sarica (PhD Candidate, IMS, top left) on their recent publication titled, "Transcranial ultrasound stimulation of motor networks in Parkinson's disease informed by local field potential dynamics," published in Science Translational Medicine and featured as the journal's cover image (bottom right). Dr. Sarica shared co-first authorship on this study with Drs. Ghazaleh Darmani and Hamid Ramezanpour, both from the Krembil Research Institute.
Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (TUS) is an emerging non-invasive brain stimulation technology with the potential to modulate deep brain circuits without the need for implanted electrodes. In the future, this approach may provide some of the benefits of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) without surgery for patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders when delivered across repeated treatment sessions. However, before designing repeated treatment paradigms, it is essential to understand the effects of a single stimulation session on the human brain.
To address this challenge, the team developed a novel method called TUS-LFP, which combines focused ultrasound stimulation with direct recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) from deep brain structures using implanted DBS electrodes in patients with Parkinson's disease. This approach allowed researchers to observe, in real time, how ultrasound influences neural activity within the basal ganglia. They found that the ultrasound protocol used in this study reduced pathological brain oscillations associated with Parkinson's disease and that these neural changes were accompanied by modest but significant improvements in motor symptoms.
These findings establish TUS-LFP as a powerful platform for characterizing the biological effects of focused ultrasound in the human brain and may help accelerate the development of future non-invasive therapies for neurological disorders.
Read more about the publication here:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.ady1883
