Transcranial focused ultrasound modulates the activity of primary somatosensory cortex in humans

What the hell is it going to take to put something like this into a stroke protocol?  I could have used better sensation since it seems that the white matter underlying my sensory cortex was damaged.
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3620.html

• Wynn Legon,
• Tomokazu F Sato,
• Alexander Opitz,
• Jerel Mueller,
• Aaron Barbour,
• Amanda Williams
• & William J Tyler

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• Corresponding author

Nature Neuroscience

(2014)

doi:10.1038/nn.3620

Received

10 September 2013

Accepted

04 December 2013

Published online

12 January 2014

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Abstract

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Improved methods of noninvasively modulating human brain function are needed. Here we probed the influence of transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) targeted to the human primary somatosensory cortex (S1) on sensory-evoked brain activity and sensory discrimination abilities. The lateral and axial spatial resolution of the tFUS beam implemented were 4.9 mm and 18 mm, respectively. Electroencephalographic recordings showed that tFUS significantly attenuated the amplitudes of somatosensory evoked potentials elicited by median nerve stimulation. We also found that tFUS significantly modulated the spectral content of sensory-evoked brain oscillations. The changes produced by tFUS on sensory-evoked brain activity were abolished when the acoustic beam was focused 1 cm anterior or posterior to S1. Behavioral investigations showed that tFUS targeted to S1 enhanced performance on sensory discrimination tasks without affecting task attention or response bias. We conclude that tFUS can be used to focally modulate human cortical function.