A Brain-on-Chip Platform for Focused Ultrasonic Stimulation (Icarus)

We envision a tailored brain-on-chip platform which could provide a convenient match for focused ultrasound (FUS) stimulation to unravel its working principles, with long-term goal of providing an electrical, thermal and mechanical sensing map of brain tissue response when locally stimulated by FUS.
In this regard, one of the major technological drawbacks of ultrasound stimulation is the big form factor of the ultrasound transducers, consisting of single-element focused transducers. These transducers provide arbitrary ultrasound sonication parameters, in contrast to traditional linear array transducers used in ultrasound medical imaging, and thus give researchers flexibility in designing their experiments. However, the bulkiness of these transducers prevents their use in the present context.
Therefore, we aim at developing and integrating arrays of acoustic micro-actuators within a brain-on-chip platform as source of focused ultrasonic stimulation of neural tissues.