My phone crawls with all the processing happening on the site.

I thought the whole "we can guess what you're thinking from an MRI" thing was BS, along the lines: take a small set of photos, image people's brains as they are looking at these pictures, to map to some low-dimensional vector of "brain activity". Then show them some of these (in sample!) pictures, measure the vector of activity and predict back what they were looking at.

Happy to be corrected. But if that's right then this... does the BS thing in a potentially less intrusive way?

Can anyone explain how this ultrasound can see through the skull?

I've worked on ultrasound devices and data, the shadows from bone, and distortions caused by tissue types were very difficult. If this device can deal with those distortions it would already be useful for lung imaging.

Amazing spacial precision but the article doesn’t mention the time domain. I assume a brain interface needs to have a pretty high sampling rate in order to meaningfully decode human thought.

Looking at the animations, it’s not hard to imagine this being a fast, low cost test for strokes that can be deployed basically anywhere in the world. Life saving technology.

Every few years one of these ultrasound companies comes around and promising to revolutionize medical imaging and nothing ever comes of it. Anyone remember https://www.openwater.health? The same ideas are in a perpetual state of being reinvented and part of me thinks its just a hustle for the MIT Media Lab/Stanford Imaging grads to give them something to do.

The tell is "super resolution", "brain computer interface" and "mixed modality" -- adding some contrast agent here, or maybe an IR light source.

It turns out the nyquist limit, diffraction and physics are real things.

Is this the same tech the Midjourney scanner device is using?

This is complete nonsense. Ultrasound can’t effectively penetrate the skull. The entire thing (and Midjourney’s) is vibed-up nonsense.

The only reason this even exists as a brainfart and hasn’t been immediately laughed out of VC funding is because other imaging modalities require either ionising radiation (illegal to produce without source licences) or an enormous magnet (would be wildly unsafe in the hands of what appear to be circus clowns).

Geoffrey Hinton was hilariously wrong 10 years ago about replacing radiologists, and this is just embarrassing. Maybe try fixing US healthcare funding instead if you want cheaper scans.

I want to see this done on a primate. Does a monkey recognise a bus? in how much detail? do they dream? Then do cats too. what are they thinking when they sit on the overheating pc? knocking my fresh coffee over?

A whole world of reasoning behind evolutionary solutions to explore.

Interesting technology, and of course transcranial ultrasound has been around for a while. But ultrasound even at low doses, does stimulate neurons in the brain, and so until we have more data I would be careful about applying it to the entire brain or portions thereof. transcranial focused ultrasound, which has been studied and shows great potential in medical or therapeutic domains, is highly precise, and even then we see that it can have adverse neuropsychological effects depending on the area stimulated, frequency, used, duration, and natural variance between individuals.