Researchers at CUBE, the Center for Ultrasound Brain Imaging, at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam have used functional ultrasound during brain surgery while patients were awake to study the vascular structure of both brain tumors and their surrounding tissues, they describe in a study published on January 9 in Frontiers in Neuroscience. “For the first time, we now have access to a technique with which we can image the living brain and brain tumors directly and with an unprecedented level of precision,” Pieter Kruizinga and Sadaf Soloukey, researchers at CUBE and two of the paper’s authors, write in a press release emailed to The Scientist.
The team used functional ultrasound, a new neuroimaging tool that can detect minute changes in blood flow, to illuminate the complete vasculature of one patient’s lower grade glioma tumor, revealing a network of blood vessels similar to a tree’s branches.
“The organization we saw ...
