Imaging technique promises to aid relief of chronic back pain

Developed at UC Riverside, fUSI (functional ultrasound imaging) enables clinicians to see the spinal cord and map the cord’s response to treatments in real time. A paper published in Neuron details how fUSI worked for six people undergoing electrical stimulation for chronic back pain treatment.

“The fUSI scanner is freely mobile across various settings and eliminates the requirement for the extensive infrastructure associated with classical neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),” said Vasileios Christopoulos, assistant professor of bioengineering at UCR who helped develop the technology. “Additionally, it offers ten times the sensitivity for detecting neuroactivation compared to fMRI.”

According to UC Riverside , it has been difficult to evaluate whether a back pain treatment is working since patients are under anesthesia and cannot provide verbal feedback on their pain levels during treatment.

“With ultrasound, we can monitor blood flow changes in the spinal cord induced by the electrical stimulation. This can be an indication that the treatment is working,” Christopoulos said in a statement.