9 ms·

Ultrasound imaging of the brain

324 points by rossant 3mo ago

echelon 3mo ago
This is ridiculously cool, but I have a ton of questions. > The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells. They're an FDA-approved contrast agent, Combined with ultrasound, could these be causing damage of any kind to the vasculature? > A few years ago, a paper came out that blew our minds. The idea was that you can decode what someone is looking at just from their brain activity. How realistically close can this get to reading thoughts, visuals, etc.? Do we have a path to imaging people's visual cortex? Their inner lives, dialogues, memories? (Scary thought - this could be used as an interrogation tool without consent. "Did you kill Bob?" could be a simple brain scan.) Can it be done in real time in a feedback loop and perhaps be used as an advanced reinforcement learning system?
- BurningFrog 3mo ago
  This kind of mind reading could easily become the end of human privacy. That's bad enough in democracies, but the consequences in more common forms of government seem really dystopian.
pixelpoet 3mo ago
Sulfur hexafluoride escaping is exceptionally damaging as a greenhouse gas, is there nothing else they can use? Edit: wow, serves me right for asking / not understanding that contrast means SF6...
- amluto 3mo ago
  Their goal is contrast-free imaging — read the bottom of the article.
w4yai 3mo ago
It feels like ultrasound is solving everything for the last week.
- qgin 3mo ago
  There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    The Midjourney scanners don’t do the same thing that this is using. See how blurry the first image on the page is? That’s what you get from ultrasound through bone like the skull. They used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles. The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into everyone’s veins.
    - qgin 3mo ago
      Absolutely, but it was claims about ultrasound in general
    - modeless 3mo ago
      This scanner doesn't inject bubble contrast either. A nurse does it. Obviously a nurse could do that when you use the Midjourney scanner too...
  - NitpickLawyer 3mo ago
    The damage done by Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos goes way further than just that company. There is a lot of distrust now in anything tech that touches on medical devices. Some of it is for good measure, some of it will prevent really cool stuff from happening.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      Exactly. The concept itself; a machine that can do a bunch of tests from a whole lot less blood would be amazing but anyone who wants to do this now is automatically "oh so like Theranos" and then not gonna give you money to do this PhD or post doc and do you figure out a way to do this? You can't raise money because everyone's gonna be thinking of Theranos.
tiahura 3mo ago
How about just getting it more established in orthopedic practices so patients aren't required to 1. See ortho for MRI referral 2. schedule mri at imaging facility 3. PAY $750 - $3000 for an MRI 4. Wait to get back into ortho. I really don't understand why a fetus' heart can be examined for defects, but you can't use it in the office to tell me if my labrum is torn?
- XorNot 3mo ago
  Why in the heck was this comment downvoted? Because that was exactly my thought reading the article: the mind machine interface stuff is weird (and fMRI blood flow is never going to achieve a lot it is a blunt tool which this is related to). But high resolution imaging of blood flow? That's a pretty great medical diagnostic tool if you can make it more available and cheaper.
  - tiahura 3mo ago
    Additionally, as an ambulance chaser who looks at medical bills all day, people don't realize how much of the zombie medical debt out there is from scummy ERs (HCA etc) doing 2 or 3 pointless MRIs at $5k a pop.
- haldujai 3mo ago
  Ultrasound is very operator dependent. Shoulder ultrasound is very hard. Visualizing the labrum let alone detecting pathology is very very hard and you will miss huge chunks of it due to limited windows. Ignoring all of this, there are few sub specialist radiologists in the world who could theoretically do this and if you were to pay for their time it would cost more than a highly reproducible and easy to get MRI.
rich_sasha 3mo ago
I thought the whole "we can guess what you're thinking from an MRI" thing was BS, along the lines: take a small set of photos, image people's brains as they are looking at these pictures, to map to some low-dimensional vector of "brain activity". Then show them some of these (in sample!) pictures, measure the vector of activity and predict back what they were looking at. Happy to be corrected. But if that's right then this... does the BS thing in a potentially less intrusive way?
- fastball 3mo ago
  How is that BS? If the technique works, you can grow your sample of imaged brains and viewed images ad infinitum, and then why wouldn't I be able to tell what random thing any random person is looking at?
- SubiculumCode 3mo ago
  1. Yes, that is generally what those studies did. 2. Th studies are not BS, the popular press description of those studies is BS.
  - SubiculumCode 3mo ago
    The patterns and locations of activations might be predictive within a sample of images, but cannot discriminate in other samples. The temporal and spatial resolution is too low.
  - rich_sasha 3mo ago
    Great. Do you have to hand an accessible non-BS description of one of those? I have no biology background, but one ML PoV in-depth description I read of these sounded indistinguishable from BS.
amluto 3mo ago
re: imaging red blood cells The super-resolution trick as they’ve done it is highly reliant on the sparseness of the bubbles. If you imagine a point or a very sparse set of points at low resolution, you can fit for the locations of those points even though you don’t see them clearly. This is a common technique in radio astronomy and (I assume although I don’t have personal knowledge) astrometry, and compressed sensing was an extremely hot field a while back. But RBCs are weird squishy things, and they fill the bloodstream quite densely, and ChatGPT estimates that they’re spaced about 20µm apart and that, when confined to a capillary, they’re about 7µm long. (And that sounds at least plausibly correct to me.) So, even ignoring the much worse scattering properties of RBCs, they not nearly as sparse. You mostly lose a whole dimension of sparseness and up trying to resolve the entire capillary. Which seems possible but much harder. Unfortunately, brain capillaries are about 40µm apart, so the result might be a mess. The article did not say what wavelength they’re using or what their native (wavelength/2) resolution is.
- sheepscreek 3mo ago
  I’m a complete layman to this field, but what the article did say was they’re hopeful that AI/ML can help develop a model that can pull out information such as the scattering caused by RBCs (which is present in the large volume of data gathered by the probe but is too weak to be used for manual techniques) and turn that into meaningful visuals. That’s gonna require a ton of data and that is exactly what they are trying to gather now with what they have built so far.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  Showing us a technique that is entirely reliant on sparseness and then saying they hope to employ it on something that isn’t sparse at all (blood cells) does feel misleading. I’m filing this in the category of technologies I wish could be true, but for which no plausible path to overcoming the obvious limitations has been provided.
  - nick238 3mo ago
    From the bubble center plot, I'm guessing that the bubbles are separated on average about a few mm apart? Taking the other comment's guess at face value, you're going from about 2 mm to 20 um, so 2 orders of magnitude. Air (technically SF6 in the article) and water (RBC is close enough) have acoustic impedances that differ by 3.5 orders of magnitude. My assumptions here are *extremely generous*, i.e. favorable to the "oh, we'll just make it work with natural contrast", and even then, they can't hand wave 5-6 orders of magnitude of improvement. Furthermore, because of the use of super resolution, I'm guessing there's some exponential factor in there, i.e. double the density of bubbles/tracking points past some critical limit, then you need 8x the data to reconstruct things.
nico 3mo ago
Is this the same tech the Midjourney scanner device is using?
- ogundipeore 3mo ago
  Yeah, they’re using butterfly network chips for the ultrasound but with some additions. (IV with microbubbles that they can trace as it flows through the brain & some extra imaging algorithms)
  - cyber-anderson 3mo ago
    [dead]
Aurornis 3mo ago
> The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells. The high resolution images were generated by injecting sparse bubbles of this contrast agent. How sparse are they? Is the image we see a stacked set of many bubbles over time composited together? Their aspirations at the end of doing this without the bubbles are great, but there’s a big “now draw the rest of the owl” energy around that leap. The first technique relies entirely on the bubbles, but they provide no explanation for how they think this could be achievable without the bubbles other than vaguely saying that technology is advancing.
frangonf 3mo ago
Meta is also going at it [0], which inevitably makes me ponder some orwellian questions for the near future: If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a new Brain Pole in my neighborhood? I saw a bunch of dark thoughted young males around and my amazon think camera says the probability of missing packages increased. [0]https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundation-model/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundatio...
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  Certainly the thing of sci-fi nightmares, but not practical. All of these imaging techniques are very involved. Ultrasound requires direct contact and this technique only works with a long IV infusion of bubbles. fMRI isn’t going to be a portable device that you can point at something for many reasons. The connection to what you’re thinking is more sci-fi than reality. This technique could theoretically see some changes in blood flow to different regions, but what would that mean? Is the patient having anxiety, or are they just nervous about the IV injecting bubbles into them to travel to their brain and the machine attached to their head?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- paytonjjones 3mo ago
  The current state of the world, where we have insane and ubiquitous surveillance tech but our packages are nevertheless being constantly stolen (with the thieves "caught" under said surveillance but with no one bothering to enforce it), is certainly an interesting one. I wonder what Orwell would have thought.
  - brendoelfrendo 3mo ago
    The surveillance is not about protecting you or your property; I'd argue it never has been. It's about protecting those in power and entrenching the power they wield.
iamleppert 3mo ago
Every few years one of these ultrasound companies comes around and promising to revolutionize medical imaging and nothing ever comes of it. Anyone remember https://www.openwater.health https://www.openwater.health? The same ideas are in a perpetual state of being reinvented and part of me thinks its just a hustle for the MIT Media Lab/Stanford Imaging grads to give them something to do. The tell is "super resolution", "brain computer interface" and "mixed modality" -- adding some contrast agent here, or maybe an IR light source. It turns out the nyquist limit, diffraction and physics are real things.
- pedalpete 3mo ago
  It doesn't work until it does. The same thing has been said about robotics, AI, space travel, etc. etc. I'm not saying this is the way, and I have significant questions of understanding thought based on reading brain activity, but I wouldn't put down the entire ultrasound field.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
    It doesn't work unless it does. Until implies we're just waiting. Unless implies actual evidence, and - in medical procedures - some guarantee of safety. SF6 plus ultrasound is used to open the blood brain barrier. So if you're pumping a lot of ultrasound into a brain and using a lot of SF6, there are already risks.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  but technology is getting better all the time what doesn't work because they only have one Tesla, well shit, let's try it with 100.
  - iamleppert 3mo ago
    It isn't a matter of technology. It's physics and math. These things are already very well understood, just not by investors. And that creates room for the hustle.
brador 3mo ago
We could have standing/lean back MRI. But it would require taller rooms which are non standard.
wildylion 3mo ago
Who could've thought that injecting SF6 into blood vessels is actually safe enough to be FDA-approved... interesting.
- Preseason8448 3mo ago
  Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) with microbubbles has been around clinically for 20+ years. There are many contrast-agent manufacturers, e.g. Bracco (SonoVue/Lumason) or GE Healthcare (Optison). Safety-wise it's probably better than CT iodinated contrast or gadolinium MRI agents, and it's pretty well-established at this point.
- fernly 3mo ago
  Per Wikipedia, it "is a colorless, odorless, non-flammable, and non-toxic gas." When used as a contrast agent for ultrasound, it "has been used to examine the vascularity of tumours" -- which would be similar to its use in the OP. Then "[i]t remains visible in the blood for 3 to 8 minutes, and is exhaled by the lungs." So -- not collected and excreted by the liver, as I at first thought.
thaw13579 3mo ago
Cool work and proof of concept, and very excited to see where this goes. However, I do think there is enough exaggeration and missing information here that it warrants some critical appraisal. What's really missing is a comparison and validation with any existing medical imaging tech. Whole brain, contrast-free neurovascular imaging is essentially solved with MRI, why not run a scan and compare? Ultrasound is of course portable and less expensive, but MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost for medical workflows, and low-field brain MRI is addressing the portability and cost issues to some extent. I guess they are pitching this as a wearable "telepathy" device, which I think appropriately differentiates their product, but of course, this wording also invokes a framing that "you won't / don't need to know how it works," which invites skepticism and a higher bar for validation in my view.
- kyawzazaw 3mo ago
  most cities where?
  - thaw13579 3mo ago
    Here are OECD and WHO reports on regional availability of MRI: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025_8f9e3f98-en/full-report/diagnostic-technologies_9039027d.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025... https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/total-density-per-million-population-magnetic-resonance-imaging https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai... Africa, Central & South America are clearly underserved, perhaps a good opportunity for ultrasound and low-field MRI
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
- switchbak 3mo ago
  "MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost" - I live in one of those first-world countries, and our citizens regularly wait many months if not over a year to get a single MRI scan. Yes, it's not just an issue of the MRI but the entire medical system, but the point still stands. Were there machines that were one or more orders of magnitude cheaper and simpler to run - I think we would see a marked increase in availability. I agree on your ground-truth desire, and I would hope they've done a lot of that to validate what we see here.
CurbStomper 3mo ago
[flagged]
trevor-e 3mo ago
Not trying to sound alarmist at all but I am wondering if ultrasounds are safe to be used like this? My understanding is it's basically a high-frequency sound wave which is probably fine for most tissue usage, however here it says it's scattering off of red blood cells. I don't know why that feels so unsettling to me.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  Waves scatter off of everything so that's not of concern. Depending on the intensity, frequency, and tissue in question ultrasound can have an effect. Someone elsewhere linked to a couple academic papers on the topic. I share your hesitation about using this on the brain, at least barring exhaustive long term animal model trials. Subject a mammal to this every day for 10 years and show that there are no negative effects relative to the control.
crmd 3mo ago
Amazing spacial precision but the article doesn’t mention the time domain. I assume a brain interface needs to have a pretty high sampling rate in order to meaningfully decode human thought.
anax32 3mo ago
Can anyone explain how this ultrasound can see through the skull? I've worked on ultrasound devices and data, the shadows from bone, and distortions caused by tissue types were very difficult. If this device can deal with those distortions it would already be useful for lung imaging.
- DoctorOetker 3mo ago
  lungs are much harder than brain and bones (the acoustic impedances of solids and liquids is more similar than solids/liquids vs air: air is very thin)
janalsncm 3mo ago
Looking at the animations, it’s not hard to imagine this being a fast, low cost test for strokes that can be deployed basically anywhere in the world. Life saving technology.
- ogundipeore 3mo ago
  You can already do this with EEGs for low-ish cost
tokyovigilante 3mo ago
This is complete nonsense. Ultrasound can’t effectively penetrate the skull. The entire thing (and Midjourney’s) is vibed-up nonsense. The only reason this even exists as a brainfart and hasn’t been immediately laughed out of VC funding is because other imaging modalities require either ionising radiation (illegal to produce without source licences) or an enormous magnet (would be wildly unsafe in the hands of what appear to be circus clowns). Geoffrey Hinton was hilariously wrong 10 years ago about replacing radiologists, and this is just embarrassing. Maybe try fixing US healthcare funding instead if you want cheaper scans.
- fastball 3mo ago
  Ultrasound can penetrate the skull, esp if through a thin part of the skull (like the temporal bone, which going from the graphic on the website is exactly where they are targeting these waves) and with targeted frequencies. You are misinformed.
  - tokyovigilante 3mo ago
    I am a consultant radiologist. Tell that to my 6-month old infants who require MRI with GA because their fontanelles are closed. Transtemporal can give you a poorly resolved image of the 3rd ventricle at a pinch. “Targeted frequencies” - righto.
    - DoctorOetker 3mo ago
      it's widely accepted that ultrasound applied to the skull is even audible, this was discovered shortly after WWII: Gavreau in 1948 and then Pumphrey in 1950, who proposed the middle ear ossicles simply form a low-pass filter, although the situation is a lot more cloudy to this day: the topotonic relationship or the subjective frequencies don't seem to correspond to their actual frequencies. It's unclear if that is due to intermodulation distortion (non-linear frequency mixing) or perhaps even simply the frequency relationships being novel to the untrained ear (for the first time exposed to ultrasound, well not really, when biting on food or generally clenching the teeth and associated friction between upper and lower teeth are bound to emit countless ultrasounds, but not exactly harmonic oscillators, so perhaps the brain has only learn't time domain associations and little to no frequency domain associations for these higher frequencies) If you believe ultrasound categorically can not penetrate the skull, while the much longer used Weber and Rinne tests clearly demonstrate bone conduction of sounds by placing a tuning fork against the skull, so I wonder how you explain that: audible frequencies can pass but independently defined ultrasound is unable to pass?
davi 3mo ago
Even low-dose ultrasound (what they use on pregnant woman) results in ultrastructural changes in brains [0], specifically at the nodes of Ranvier (the gaps between myelin along axons). See also [1] for a review. [0] Ellisman MH, Palmer DE, André MP (1987), "Diagnostic levels of ultrasound may disrupt myelination," Experimental Neurology 98:78–92 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3308504/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3308504/ [1] Quarato, C.M.I., Lacedonia, D., Salvemini, M., Tuccari, G., Mastrodonato, G., Villani, R., Fiore, L.A., Scioscia, G., Mirijello, A., Saponara, A. and Sperandeo, M., 2023. A review on biological effects of ultrasounds: key messages for clinicians. Diagnostics, 13(5), p.855. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10001275/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10001275/
- extheat 3mo ago
  All sound is vibration, so everything is affected by sound at some point as the vibrations propagate through and physically move around materials. Humans can hear because the audible frequency range moves receptors in human inner ears, and as you can imagine this isn't local to the ear, the whole brain will be affected (but biology has accounted for this). If you knock on wood that sound is audible in many frequencies--below human audible, audible and also above human audible (what we call 'ultrasound'). What is more dangerous generally is sustained noise at any frequency; lower frequency + high amplitude is one of the most harmful as that can physically push you.
  - arlyle 3mo ago
    >sustained noise at any frequency is dangerous is this your conclusion? are there any studies you can link? thanks.
- krzat 3mo ago
  Interesting, if ultrasound effects the brain, then maybe specific pattern could be used to non-destructively stimulate it?
  - westurner 3mo ago
    There's Ultrasound DBS Deep Brain Stimulation. /? ultrasound brain stimulation: https://www.google.com/search?q=ultrasound+brain+stimulation https://www.google.com/search?q=ultrasound+brain+stimulation There's ultrasound for Alzheimer's, which may not be about Amyloid Tau; "Improving Cognition Without Clearing Amyloid: Effects of Tau and Ultrasound Neuromodulation" (2024) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/JAD-240616 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/JAD-240616 ... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17464866140298681860&as_sdt=5,43&sciodt=0,43&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1746486614029868186... Also, Beta-Cyclodextrin apparently reverses atherosclerosis in the body and brain - by "absorbing" sugar-alcohol FWIU - and it's already approved but we don't know what dose is low enough to be safe.
Unearned5161 3mo ago
The imaging stuff is cool but the homepage is making me wince. There's a compelling argument to be made that the level of detail in "mind reading" they are gesturing at is plain unrecoverable with hemodynamics. There's an irreversible loss of dimensions that occurs the instant you start recording blood instead of spikes on the neural circuits themselves, and it's not at all clear that what a VC reading the words "telepathy" is imagining even survives that transformation. What you have is food delivery data for a neighborhood, this can tell you a surprising amount, including when they might throw a party. What it can't tell you, however, is who wore the best outfit and what was talked about over dinner. The information simply does not survive across the interface. There is a spectacular canyon between "informed interpretation" and "mind reading"
insane_dreamer 3mo ago
Interesting technology, and of course transcranial ultrasound has been around for a while. But ultrasound even at low doses, does stimulate neurons in the brain, and so until we have more data I would be careful about applying it to the entire brain or portions thereof. transcranial focused ultrasound, which has been studied and shows great potential in medical or therapeutic domains, is highly precise, and even then we see that it can have adverse neuropsychological effects depending on the area stimulated, frequency, used, duration, and natural variance between individuals.
deadbabe 3mo ago
Imagine a future where we could distill some kind of “weights” from living human brains when we’ve run out of quality training data for AI using this tech.
jzer0cool 3mo ago
My phone crawls with all the processing happening on the site.
brador 3mo ago
I want to see this done on a primate. Does a monkey recognise a bus? in how much detail? do they dream? Then do cats too. what are they thinking when they sit on the overheating pc? knocking my fresh coffee over? A whole world of reasoning behind evolutionary solutions to explore.
laxpri 3mo ago
Naive question , isnot there any latency problem considering sound wave .
danspots 3mo ago
Where are they injecting these microbubbles? Directly into the brain continuously?
remopulcini 3mo ago
Interessante, ma siamo ancora lontani. Penso che ti occupi di Risonsanza Magnaetica

324 points by rossant 3mo ago

This is ridiculously cool, but I have a ton of questions. > The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells. They're an FDA-approved contrast agent, Combined with ultrasound, could these be causing damage of any kind to the vasculature? > A few years ago, a paper came out that blew our minds. The idea was that you can decode what someone is looking at just from their brain activity. How realistically close can this get to reading thoughts, visuals, etc.? Do we have a path to imaging people's visual cortex? Their inner lives, dialogues, memories? (Scary thought - this could be used as an interrogation tool without consent. "Did you kill Bob?" could be a simple brain scan.) Can it be done in real time in a feedback loop and perhaps be used as an advanced reinforcement learning system?

BurningFrog 3mo ago
This kind of mind reading could easily become the end of human privacy. That's bad enough in democracies, but the consequences in more common forms of government seem really dystopian.

pixelpoet 3mo ago

Sulfur hexafluoride escaping is exceptionally damaging as a greenhouse gas, is there nothing else they can use? Edit: wow, serves me right for asking / not understanding that contrast means SF6...

amluto 3mo ago
Their goal is contrast-free imaging — read the bottom of the article.

w4yai 3mo ago

It feels like ultrasound is solving everything for the last week.

qgin 3mo ago
There were a lot of people who declared very loudly last week during the Midjourney discourse that this was an impossible use of ultrasound.
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  The Midjourney scanners don’t do the same thing that this is using. See how blurry the first image on the page is? That’s what you get from ultrasound through bone like the skull. They used a trick to inject sparse bubbles into the patient and let them flow through the brain, then looked for the perturbations caused by those sparse bubbles. The Midjourney scanners aren’t injecting this bubble contrast agent into everyone’s veins.
  - qgin 3mo ago
    Absolutely, but it was claims about ultrasound in general
  - modeless 3mo ago
    This scanner doesn't inject bubble contrast either. A nurse does it. Obviously a nurse could do that when you use the Midjourney scanner too...
- NitpickLawyer 3mo ago
  The damage done by Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos goes way further than just that company. There is a lot of distrust now in anything tech that touches on medical devices. Some of it is for good measure, some of it will prevent really cool stuff from happening.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Exactly. The concept itself; a machine that can do a bunch of tests from a whole lot less blood would be amazing but anyone who wants to do this now is automatically "oh so like Theranos" and then not gonna give you money to do this PhD or post doc and do you figure out a way to do this? You can't raise money because everyone's gonna be thinking of Theranos.

tiahura 3mo ago

How about just getting it more established in orthopedic practices so patients aren't required to 1. See ortho for MRI referral 2. schedule mri at imaging facility 3. PAY $750 - $3000 for an MRI 4. Wait to get back into ortho. I really don't understand why a fetus' heart can be examined for defects, but you can't use it in the office to tell me if my labrum is torn?

XorNot 3mo ago
Why in the heck was this comment downvoted? Because that was exactly my thought reading the article: the mind machine interface stuff is weird (and fMRI blood flow is never going to achieve a lot it is a blunt tool which this is related to). But high resolution imaging of blood flow? That's a pretty great medical diagnostic tool if you can make it more available and cheaper.
- tiahura 3mo ago
  Additionally, as an ambulance chaser who looks at medical bills all day, people don't realize how much of the zombie medical debt out there is from scummy ERs (HCA etc) doing 2 or 3 pointless MRIs at $5k a pop.
haldujai 3mo ago
Ultrasound is very operator dependent. Shoulder ultrasound is very hard. Visualizing the labrum let alone detecting pathology is very very hard and you will miss huge chunks of it due to limited windows. Ignoring all of this, there are few sub specialist radiologists in the world who could theoretically do this and if you were to pay for their time it would cost more than a highly reproducible and easy to get MRI.

rich_sasha 3mo ago

I thought the whole "we can guess what you're thinking from an MRI" thing was BS, along the lines: take a small set of photos, image people's brains as they are looking at these pictures, to map to some low-dimensional vector of "brain activity". Then show them some of these (in sample!) pictures, measure the vector of activity and predict back what they were looking at. Happy to be corrected. But if that's right then this... does the BS thing in a potentially less intrusive way?

fastball 3mo ago
How is that BS? If the technique works, you can grow your sample of imaged brains and viewed images ad infinitum, and then why wouldn't I be able to tell what random thing any random person is looking at?
SubiculumCode 3mo ago
1. Yes, that is generally what those studies did. 2. Th studies are not BS, the popular press description of those studies is BS.
- SubiculumCode 3mo ago
  The patterns and locations of activations might be predictive within a sample of images, but cannot discriminate in other samples. The temporal and spatial resolution is too low.
- rich_sasha 3mo ago
  Great. Do you have to hand an accessible non-BS description of one of those? I have no biology background, but one ML PoV in-depth description I read of these sounded indistinguishable from BS.

amluto 3mo ago

re: imaging red blood cells The super-resolution trick as they’ve done it is highly reliant on the sparseness of the bubbles. If you imagine a point or a very sparse set of points at low resolution, you can fit for the locations of those points even though you don’t see them clearly. This is a common technique in radio astronomy and (I assume although I don’t have personal knowledge) astrometry, and compressed sensing was an extremely hot field a while back. But RBCs are weird squishy things, and they fill the bloodstream quite densely, and ChatGPT estimates that they’re spaced about 20µm apart and that, when confined to a capillary, they’re about 7µm long. (And that sounds at least plausibly correct to me.) So, even ignoring the much worse scattering properties of RBCs, they not nearly as sparse. You mostly lose a whole dimension of sparseness and up trying to resolve the entire capillary. Which seems possible but much harder. Unfortunately, brain capillaries are about 40µm apart, so the result might be a mess. The article did not say what wavelength they’re using or what their native (wavelength/2) resolution is.

sheepscreek 3mo ago
I’m a complete layman to this field, but what the article did say was they’re hopeful that AI/ML can help develop a model that can pull out information such as the scattering caused by RBCs (which is present in the large volume of data gathered by the probe but is too weak to be used for manual techniques) and turn that into meaningful visuals. That’s gonna require a ton of data and that is exactly what they are trying to gather now with what they have built so far.
Aurornis 3mo ago
Showing us a technique that is entirely reliant on sparseness and then saying they hope to employ it on something that isn’t sparse at all (blood cells) does feel misleading. I’m filing this in the category of technologies I wish could be true, but for which no plausible path to overcoming the obvious limitations has been provided.
- nick238 3mo ago
  From the bubble center plot, I'm guessing that the bubbles are separated on average about a few mm apart? Taking the other comment's guess at face value, you're going from about 2 mm to 20 um, so 2 orders of magnitude. Air (technically SF6 in the article) and water (RBC is close enough) have acoustic impedances that differ by 3.5 orders of magnitude. My assumptions here are *extremely generous*, i.e. favorable to the "oh, we'll just make it work with natural contrast", and even then, they can't hand wave 5-6 orders of magnitude of improvement. Furthermore, because of the use of super resolution, I'm guessing there's some exponential factor in there, i.e. double the density of bubbles/tracking points past some critical limit, then you need 8x the data to reconstruct things.

nico 3mo ago

Is this the same tech the Midjourney scanner device is using?

ogundipeore 3mo ago
Yeah, they’re using butterfly network chips for the ultrasound but with some additions. (IV with microbubbles that they can trace as it flows through the brain & some extra imaging algorithms)
- cyber-anderson 3mo ago
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Aurornis 3mo ago

> The bubbles themselves are pockets of sulfur hexafluoride encapsulated in lipid shells. The high resolution images were generated by injecting sparse bubbles of this contrast agent. How sparse are they? Is the image we see a stacked set of many bubbles over time composited together? Their aspirations at the end of doing this without the bubbles are great, but there’s a big “now draw the rest of the owl” energy around that leap. The first technique relies entirely on the bubbles, but they provide no explanation for how they think this could be achievable without the bubbles other than vaguely saying that technology is advancing.

frangonf 3mo ago

Meta is also going at it [0], which inevitably makes me ponder some orwellian questions for the near future: If I bring my pet mouse to the cinema and my friend scans the movie back using his apple ifmri does the DRM still holds or will the mouses be DRM locked? Will my iris suffice for booting my computer or would I need to press accept all brainwave cookies? Can I email my local Flock representative to install a new Brain Pole in my neighborhood? I saw a bunch of dark thoughted young males around and my amazon think camera says the probability of missing packages increased. [0]https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundation-model/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/tribe-v2-brain-predictive-foundatio...

Aurornis 3mo ago
Certainly the thing of sci-fi nightmares, but not practical. All of these imaging techniques are very involved. Ultrasound requires direct contact and this technique only works with a long IV infusion of bubbles. fMRI isn’t going to be a portable device that you can point at something for many reasons. The connection to what you’re thinking is more sci-fi than reality. This technique could theoretically see some changes in blood flow to different regions, but what would that mean? Is the patient having anxiety, or are they just nervous about the IV injecting bubbles into them to travel to their brain and the machine attached to their head?
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paytonjjones 3mo ago
The current state of the world, where we have insane and ubiquitous surveillance tech but our packages are nevertheless being constantly stolen (with the thieves "caught" under said surveillance but with no one bothering to enforce it), is certainly an interesting one. I wonder what Orwell would have thought.
- brendoelfrendo 3mo ago
  The surveillance is not about protecting you or your property; I'd argue it never has been. It's about protecting those in power and entrenching the power they wield.

iamleppert 3mo ago

Every few years one of these ultrasound companies comes around and promising to revolutionize medical imaging and nothing ever comes of it. Anyone remember https://www.openwater.health https://www.openwater.health? The same ideas are in a perpetual state of being reinvented and part of me thinks its just a hustle for the MIT Media Lab/Stanford Imaging grads to give them something to do. The tell is "super resolution", "brain computer interface" and "mixed modality" -- adding some contrast agent here, or maybe an IR light source. It turns out the nyquist limit, diffraction and physics are real things.

pedalpete 3mo ago
It doesn't work until it does. The same thing has been said about robotics, AI, space travel, etc. etc. I'm not saying this is the way, and I have significant questions of understanding thought based on reading brain activity, but I wouldn't put down the entire ultrasound field.
- TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
  It doesn't work unless it does. Until implies we're just waiting. Unless implies actual evidence, and - in medical procedures - some guarantee of safety. SF6 plus ultrasound is used to open the blood brain barrier. So if you're pumping a lot of ultrasound into a brain and using a lot of SF6, there are already risks.
fragmede 3mo ago
but technology is getting better all the time what doesn't work because they only have one Tesla, well shit, let's try it with 100.
- iamleppert 3mo ago
  It isn't a matter of technology. It's physics and math. These things are already very well understood, just not by investors. And that creates room for the hustle.

brador 3mo ago

We could have standing/lean back MRI. But it would require taller rooms which are non standard.

wildylion 3mo ago

Who could've thought that injecting SF6 into blood vessels is actually safe enough to be FDA-approved... interesting.

Preseason8448 3mo ago
Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) with microbubbles has been around clinically for 20+ years. There are many contrast-agent manufacturers, e.g. Bracco (SonoVue/Lumason) or GE Healthcare (Optison). Safety-wise it's probably better than CT iodinated contrast or gadolinium MRI agents, and it's pretty well-established at this point.
fernly 3mo ago
Per Wikipedia, it "is a colorless, odorless, non-flammable, and non-toxic gas." When used as a contrast agent for ultrasound, it "has been used to examine the vascularity of tumours" -- which would be similar to its use in the OP. Then "[i]t remains visible in the blood for 3 to 8 minutes, and is exhaled by the lungs." So -- not collected and excreted by the liver, as I at first thought.

thaw13579 3mo ago

Cool work and proof of concept, and very excited to see where this goes. However, I do think there is enough exaggeration and missing information here that it warrants some critical appraisal. What's really missing is a comparison and validation with any existing medical imaging tech. Whole brain, contrast-free neurovascular imaging is essentially solved with MRI, why not run a scan and compare? Ultrasound is of course portable and less expensive, but MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost for medical workflows, and low-field brain MRI is addressing the portability and cost issues to some extent. I guess they are pitching this as a wearable "telepathy" device, which I think appropriately differentiates their product, but of course, this wording also invokes a framing that "you won't / don't need to know how it works," which invites skepticism and a higher bar for validation in my view.

kyawzazaw 3mo ago
most cities where?
- thaw13579 3mo ago
  Here are OECD and WHO reports on regional availability of MRI: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025_8f9e3f98-en/full-report/diagnostic-technologies_9039027d.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025... https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/total-density-per-million-population-magnetic-resonance-imaging https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai... Africa, Central & South America are clearly underserved, perhaps a good opportunity for ultrasound and low-field MRI
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switchbak 3mo ago
"MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost" - I live in one of those first-world countries, and our citizens regularly wait many months if not over a year to get a single MRI scan. Yes, it's not just an issue of the MRI but the entire medical system, but the point still stands. Were there machines that were one or more orders of magnitude cheaper and simpler to run - I think we would see a marked increase in availability. I agree on your ground-truth desire, and I would hope they've done a lot of that to validate what we see here.

CurbStomper 3mo ago

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trevor-e 3mo ago

Not trying to sound alarmist at all but I am wondering if ultrasounds are safe to be used like this? My understanding is it's basically a high-frequency sound wave which is probably fine for most tissue usage, however here it says it's scattering off of red blood cells. I don't know why that feels so unsettling to me.

fc417fc802 3mo ago
Waves scatter off of everything so that's not of concern. Depending on the intensity, frequency, and tissue in question ultrasound can have an effect. Someone elsewhere linked to a couple academic papers on the topic. I share your hesitation about using this on the brain, at least barring exhaustive long term animal model trials. Subject a mammal to this every day for 10 years and show that there are no negative effects relative to the control.

crmd 3mo ago

Amazing spacial precision but the article doesn’t mention the time domain. I assume a brain interface needs to have a pretty high sampling rate in order to meaningfully decode human thought.

anax32 3mo ago

Can anyone explain how this ultrasound can see through the skull? I've worked on ultrasound devices and data, the shadows from bone, and distortions caused by tissue types were very difficult. If this device can deal with those distortions it would already be useful for lung imaging.

DoctorOetker 3mo ago
lungs are much harder than brain and bones (the acoustic impedances of solids and liquids is more similar than solids/liquids vs air: air is very thin)

janalsncm 3mo ago

Looking at the animations, it’s not hard to imagine this being a fast, low cost test for strokes that can be deployed basically anywhere in the world. Life saving technology.

ogundipeore 3mo ago
You can already do this with EEGs for low-ish cost

tokyovigilante 3mo ago

This is complete nonsense. Ultrasound can’t effectively penetrate the skull. The entire thing (and Midjourney’s) is vibed-up nonsense. The only reason this even exists as a brainfart and hasn’t been immediately laughed out of VC funding is because other imaging modalities require either ionising radiation (illegal to produce without source licences) or an enormous magnet (would be wildly unsafe in the hands of what appear to be circus clowns). Geoffrey Hinton was hilariously wrong 10 years ago about replacing radiologists, and this is just embarrassing. Maybe try fixing US healthcare funding instead if you want cheaper scans.

fastball 3mo ago
Ultrasound can penetrate the skull, esp if through a thin part of the skull (like the temporal bone, which going from the graphic on the website is exactly where they are targeting these waves) and with targeted frequencies. You are misinformed.
- tokyovigilante 3mo ago
  I am a consultant radiologist. Tell that to my 6-month old infants who require MRI with GA because their fontanelles are closed. Transtemporal can give you a poorly resolved image of the 3rd ventricle at a pinch. “Targeted frequencies” - righto.
  - DoctorOetker 3mo ago
    it's widely accepted that ultrasound applied to the skull is even audible, this was discovered shortly after WWII: Gavreau in 1948 and then Pumphrey in 1950, who proposed the middle ear ossicles simply form a low-pass filter, although the situation is a lot more cloudy to this day: the topotonic relationship or the subjective frequencies don't seem to correspond to their actual frequencies. It's unclear if that is due to intermodulation distortion (non-linear frequency mixing) or perhaps even simply the frequency relationships being novel to the untrained ear (for the first time exposed to ultrasound, well not really, when biting on food or generally clenching the teeth and associated friction between upper and lower teeth are bound to emit countless ultrasounds, but not exactly harmonic oscillators, so perhaps the brain has only learn't time domain associations and little to no frequency domain associations for these higher frequencies) If you believe ultrasound categorically can not penetrate the skull, while the much longer used Weber and Rinne tests clearly demonstrate bone conduction of sounds by placing a tuning fork against the skull, so I wonder how you explain that: audible frequencies can pass but independently defined ultrasound is unable to pass?

davi 3mo ago

Even low-dose ultrasound (what they use on pregnant woman) results in ultrastructural changes in brains [0], specifically at the nodes of Ranvier (the gaps between myelin along axons). See also [1] for a review. [0] Ellisman MH, Palmer DE, André MP (1987), "Diagnostic levels of ultrasound may disrupt myelination," Experimental Neurology 98:78–92 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3308504/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3308504/ [1] Quarato, C.M.I., Lacedonia, D., Salvemini, M., Tuccari, G., Mastrodonato, G., Villani, R., Fiore, L.A., Scioscia, G., Mirijello, A., Saponara, A. and Sperandeo, M., 2023. A review on biological effects of ultrasounds: key messages for clinicians. Diagnostics, 13(5), p.855. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10001275/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10001275/

extheat 3mo ago
All sound is vibration, so everything is affected by sound at some point as the vibrations propagate through and physically move around materials. Humans can hear because the audible frequency range moves receptors in human inner ears, and as you can imagine this isn't local to the ear, the whole brain will be affected (but biology has accounted for this). If you knock on wood that sound is audible in many frequencies--below human audible, audible and also above human audible (what we call 'ultrasound'). What is more dangerous generally is sustained noise at any frequency; lower frequency + high amplitude is one of the most harmful as that can physically push you.
- arlyle 3mo ago
  >sustained noise at any frequency is dangerous is this your conclusion? are there any studies you can link? thanks.
krzat 3mo ago
Interesting, if ultrasound effects the brain, then maybe specific pattern could be used to non-destructively stimulate it?
- westurner 3mo ago
  There's Ultrasound DBS Deep Brain Stimulation. /? ultrasound brain stimulation: https://www.google.com/search?q=ultrasound+brain+stimulation https://www.google.com/search?q=ultrasound+brain+stimulation There's ultrasound for Alzheimer's, which may not be about Amyloid Tau; "Improving Cognition Without Clearing Amyloid: Effects of Tau and Ultrasound Neuromodulation" (2024) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/JAD-240616 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/JAD-240616 ... https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=17464866140298681860&as_sdt=5,43&sciodt=0,43&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1746486614029868186... Also, Beta-Cyclodextrin apparently reverses atherosclerosis in the body and brain - by "absorbing" sugar-alcohol FWIU - and it's already approved but we don't know what dose is low enough to be safe.

Unearned5161 3mo ago

The imaging stuff is cool but the homepage is making me wince. There's a compelling argument to be made that the level of detail in "mind reading" they are gesturing at is plain unrecoverable with hemodynamics. There's an irreversible loss of dimensions that occurs the instant you start recording blood instead of spikes on the neural circuits themselves, and it's not at all clear that what a VC reading the words "telepathy" is imagining even survives that transformation. What you have is food delivery data for a neighborhood, this can tell you a surprising amount, including when they might throw a party. What it can't tell you, however, is who wore the best outfit and what was talked about over dinner. The information simply does not survive across the interface. There is a spectacular canyon between "informed interpretation" and "mind reading"

insane_dreamer 3mo ago

Interesting technology, and of course transcranial ultrasound has been around for a while. But ultrasound even at low doses, does stimulate neurons in the brain, and so until we have more data I would be careful about applying it to the entire brain or portions thereof. transcranial focused ultrasound, which has been studied and shows great potential in medical or therapeutic domains, is highly precise, and even then we see that it can have adverse neuropsychological effects depending on the area stimulated, frequency, used, duration, and natural variance between individuals.

deadbabe 3mo ago

Imagine a future where we could distill some kind of “weights” from living human brains when we’ve run out of quality training data for AI using this tech.

jzer0cool 3mo ago

My phone crawls with all the processing happening on the site.

brador 3mo ago

I want to see this done on a primate. Does a monkey recognise a bus? in how much detail? do they dream? Then do cats too. what are they thinking when they sit on the overheating pc? knocking my fresh coffee over? A whole world of reasoning behind evolutionary solutions to explore.

laxpri 3mo ago

Naive question , isnot there any latency problem considering sound wave .

danspots 3mo ago

Where are they injecting these microbubbles? Directly into the brain continuously?

remopulcini 3mo ago

Interessante, ma siamo ancora lontani. Penso che ti occupi di Risonsanza Magnaetica