Functional Ultrasound Imaging Of The Thalamo-Cortical Auditory Tract In Awake Ferrets Using Ultrafast Doppler Imaging

Large-scale functional imaging techniques are part of a fast growing field of neuroscience aiming at understanding whole brain activity. The recently introduced Functional Ultrasound Imaging (fUS), based on ultrafast Doppler, is a new very sensitive method monitoring changes in slow blood flow with a high spatial (similar to 100 mu m) and temporal (down to the cardiac time scale) resolution for a typical imaged section of 15mm wide and 20mm deep (at 15MHz, typical for animal studies), which makes it an unequalled modality in the landscape or functional imaging. It opened a large field of applications in Neuroimaging from epilepsy to spatial representation. Here we present its use to study the functional organization of auditory cortex and thalamic nuclei in the awake ferret.