Abstract There is a long-standing need in neuroscience for non-invasive methods that can record neural electrical activity with focal precision to diagnose brain disorders and interrogate circuit function. Here, we introduce acoustoelectric neural recording, which exploits ultrasound-induced frequency mixing to recover electrophysiological signals in vivo. Building on recent insights into the acoustoelectric interaction, we extend earlier work in cardiac tissue to demonstrate neural signal recovery in a living mouse brain. At the ultrasound focus, neural activity is shifted to frequencies near the acoustic carrier and can be retrieved by amplitude demodulation analogous to radio transmission. We further show that acoustoelectric neural recording is robust to artefacts and permits single-trial electrophysiological measurements. These results establish a pathway toward a real-time, portable, and non-invasive neural recording modality with the spatial precision of ultrasound.
Rintoul et al. (Tue,) studied this question.